Mental Healthcare in Cuba: A People's Right

Havana, March 31, 2006. (ACN) While in other countries psychiatric services are reserved for those people who can pay for private therapists, in Cuba mental health is a people's right.

The general secretary for the Psychiatric Association for Latin America and the Caribbean, Dr. Miguel Angel Valdez Mier, said that in the island's 169 municipalities there are qualified services being provided with the objective of offering a better quality of life for the public.

Valdez Mier highlighted the main achievements of Cuban psychiatry achieved following its revolution, mainly through primary assistance in communities with the cooperation of grass roots organizations.

The Psychiatric Association chief, who is also head of psychiatric services at Havana's Ameijeiras Brothers Hospital, participated in the First Regional Congress of the World Psychiatric Association held in the Cuban capital's International Convention Center, along with some 500 delegates from 20 nations.

Under the theme "Children Are Born to be Happy," coined by Cuban national hero Jose Marti, the event was underway parallel with the second Pan American Congress of Mental Health for Youth and the third International Psychology-Havana Conference. In these forums are taking place exchanges of experiences aimed to improve mental health promotion, prevention, assistance and the rehabilitation. "Health is not only the absence of organic illness, but the enjoyment of mental and social health with the possibility of transforming the environment," stressed Valdes Mier. "An individual who lacks social and mental health cannot be healthy; and if they are not happy, even if they do not have any type of illness... their soul aches," he said.

Among some of the Congress' main issues are children psychiatry, non-transmittable chronic illnesses, and generalized developmental mental disorders, psychoses, suicide, infant mistreatment, violence, addiction, mental retardation, teenagers and sexuality.