On June 19, ENUSP well-known speaker and Board member, Jolijn Santegoeds attended a Conference organized by ENIL at the European Youth Center in Strasbourg. After her speech at the Conference she was interviewed about her opinion on the ways how it is possibile to improve mental healthcare in Europe. A 5 minutes video was filmed that you can see below.
.@enusp: Jolijn Santegoeds, #Netherlands, on improving #mentalhealthcare in Europe https://t.co/44olnlUbsz
— Council of Europe (@coe) June 19, 2019
The subtitles for the video are as follows:
Interview at the European Youth Center in Strasbourg with Jolijn Santegoeds
-You have just finished addressing a Conference organized by the European Network on Independent Living here at the Youth Center. Your speech was devoted to the theme of mental health and human rights. So just share with us the points that you wanted to make, please.
-I think it is very important that there is a new UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which prohibits forced psychiatric treatments. And coming from our constituency as users and survivors of psychiatry, this is huge news, and it’s going to be a big change in Europe. Psychiatry will never be the same.
-Now, the fact that you are here with further evidence that mental health care in Europe is an important issue in civil society but also among politicians. Well, how do you explain that?
-Maybe because in the social media more and more stories are coming out and family members take videos inside institutions and they bring it out and it gets exposed and I think many people feel outraged. And then also politicians, they learn about the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and altogether this leads to that mental health is now being an issue on the agenda.
-The first part of your speech, Jolijn, focussed on your own personal experiences and I think we were all moved as we listened to you tell us what happened to you. But I was touched by the point that you made later on when you said that your personal experiences have informed your activism and you said that you have survived because of respect and not coercion. What did you mean by that and how it affected you now in terms of the advocacy work that you do?
-When I was 16 I was institutionalized against my will after a suicide attempt and then I was considered a danger to myself which caused that they locked me up in solitary confinement and exposed to a lot of forced treatments and I felt so bad. I felt treated like an animal, so I saw no way to live. But when this ward got closed and I was transferred to another institution they treated me so much different. They didn’t put me in solitary confinement by default, they listened to my wishes and when I said I wanted to go out they allowed me and it made me see that maybe I did have a future, and that for me made the difference.
-This conversation today is about what needs to be done to improve mental health care in Europe. You have travelled around the world talking about this issue of how to make mental healthcare better. So, what would you advice? The Comissioner of Human Rights is due to adress this Conference of the European Network on Independent Living later this week, if she was to ask you, what would you advise on how we should improve mental healthcare in Europe?
-Well, I think the very first thing is to abolish forced psychiatric treatments and any forced interventions because it has nothing to do with wellbeing or mental health, it’s horrible to experience that, and nowadays there is a whole lot of modern insight in mental healthcare which is about empowerment, recovery, chances, inclusion, support. It’s a whole different school, so I think this is a very important paradigm change because Europe has this dark past of exclusion and psychiatry is actually founded on exclusion and segregation and by really focussing on real mental health, it will be a story of inclusion, about social chances and I think it’s very important that the basis of psychiatry is changed: no more focus on exclusion but added focus on inclusion and health for all, wellbeing for all. I think this is one of the most important steps and for this I would also say that the Council of Europe should withdraw the Draft Additional Protocol to the Oviedo Convention because they tend to reauthorise forced psychiatric treatments in Europe, which is totally unacceptable because it’s against the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and against any standard of quality of care and human rights.