Manifesto of Oviedo against stigma in Mental health.

The strategy on Mental Health 2009-2013 of the Ministry of health, Social Affairs and equality, manifest as one of its general objectives, in point 3: eradicate stigma and discrimination associated with people with mental disorders ”.

The diagnosed person disorder in general and of serious mental disorder in particular has suffered and suffered the stigma of much of society, which together with the consequences of their pathology complicate their personal development.

Inappropriate media treatment, lack of knowledge that they are disorders associated with abnormal function of the brain, sometimes unpredictable developments, the taboo against suicide and above all the fear of violence, always magnified, cause an unwarranted and harmful social isolation.

Fundamental rights such as access to studies, access to work, integration with your environment, the couple’s life, greatly hinder added if the vulnerability and loss of self-esteem, almost always depending on their level of integration of the involvement of the family.

In the framework of the 15th National Congress of Psychiatry in Oviedo, and in order to disclose this problem, the Spanish psychiatric society, the Spanish society of Biological Psychiatry and the Spanish Foundation of Psychiatry and Mental health would like to state:

-a better informed societyloses the fears and reacts in a way more solidarity.

– dangerous and relationship with violent acts of the person with a mental illness is not the norm in their behavior and they must be considered, as they are, facts isolated.

-that the person with mental illness does not have any responsibility on the emergence and evolution of the same.

-that mental illness is not sinóNimo of incompetence or incapacity to develop the basic tasks of life

-that break the taboos of the disease and do understand that each person is a different patient can help see them differently from all areas of society.

-the person with a mental illness is obviously like any other but requires even more care and acceptance of the environment for its improvement.

– that the intellectual capacities of the person with mental illness are as those of the rest of the population and therefore can have the same ability to face training academic.

– skills and competences of the person with mental illness are similar to the person without mental illness and may therefore have the same capacity to develop a profesión or ex officio.

– which some people with mental illness may not develop a standard work, but in the majority of these cases can do it way monitored and adapted to their level of functioning.

-health authorities can and must redouble efforts for the integration of persons with mental illness as citizens of full right.

-That the offensive, inaccurate, inadequate terms that generate confusion, alarm and apprehension must be eradicated.

-That the media can help eradicate the stigma associated with mental illness.

Finally, we wish to disappear altogether all forms of discrimination, conscious or not, with the conviction that coupled to advances in treatments and better professional knowledge, it will be a fundamental pillar for the normalization of many people today suffering from mental health problems.

Manifesto of Oviedo against stigma in Mental Health

Oviedo, 8 to 11 November 2011