Informational Resources

Ending coercion & Alternatives

Martin Zinkler et al. 2019: “End Coercion in Mental Health Services—Toward a System Based on Support Only”, Laws 2019, 8(3), 19; https://doi.org/10.3390/laws8030019

Martin Zinkler: «Germany without Coercive Treatment in Psychiatry—A 15 Month Real World Experience», Laws 2016, 5(1), 15; https://doi.org/10.3390/laws5010015

Central and Eastern Europe In December 2019 Al Jazeera’s People and Power aired a two-part documentary exposing the ongoing institutionalisation of people with disabilities in Central and Eastern Europe. See the film online: Part 1 and Part 2

Moldova: Psychiatrist responsible for long-term (over a decade) sexual abuse against 18 women with disabilities in a Moldovan institution was finally convicted (Dec.2019). He was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. Two of the victims testified to becoming pregnant as a result of the rape. They were forced to undergo abortions, one of them as late as in the seventh month of pregnancy. Nobody listened to their complaints, until the visit of a human rights monitor in 2013. One of the victims died in unexplained circumstances drowning in a bathtub. Most of the victims remain in the institution to this day, while the convicted doctor remains under house arrest in an apartment on the premises of the institution. Read more here.

Bulgaria: Georgi was first put in an institution when he was three days old and managed to escape only at the age of 28. At the age of 21, he was placed in the Podgumer institution, where the nurse at the institution, and subsequently its director, became his guardian. The conditions in the institution were horrendous. The residents were cold, undernourished and had almost no access to warm water. They had absolutely no personal space and choice. Georgi spent months in isolation in terrible conditions. He was forced to take excessive doses of psychiatric medications without any medical reason and had no contact with the rest of the world. As a final insult, his State disability pension was taken by the institution to pay for these “services”. Giorgi’s lawyer says “The judgment came more than ten years after he managed to escape from the institution, and during the time, the State offered him almost no help with integration in the community.” The Sofia City Court judged in April 2019 that the guardianship authority is responsible for not preventing Georgi´s ill-treatment in the institution and ordered them to pay Georgi part of the damages he sought. For a childhood and large part of adulthood locked up in a horrible institution, with no possibility of leading his own private or family life, Georgi was offered approximately EUR 5 000 compensation. Read more here.