The deputies adopted a wild bill: there will be no one to save the mentally ill Russians

The new document will cancel the service for the protection of the rights of people with psychiatric disorders

“I am crying not because I am offended, but because I am ashamed of you,” Nyuta Federmesser’s speech in the State Duma on July 20 can be considered historic. On this day, at a meeting, the deputies considered amendments to the Law on Psychiatric Care, the essence of which is to abolish the service for protecting the rights of people with psychiatric disorders. Despite all the arguments against the bill, the “servants of the people” voted for the controversial amendments in the 2nd and 3rd readings.

As someone from the community noted, the return to punitive psychiatry can no longer be stopped. But I would like to believe that this is not the case. Moreover, there is one last chance – more than 40 thousand people sent a letter to the President asking him to veto the bill.

The head of the palliative care center, Nyuta Federmesser, collected negative feedback on the bill from 75 Russian NGOs for the meeting. Nobody can accuse these organizations of incompetence. But with regard to the 40,000 who signed the letter addressed to the President asking him to veto the amendments to the law “On Psychiatric Care”, the deputies noted that these figures are worth nothing. Like, people signed what they were told without understanding.

Let’s figure it out.

Psychiatrists who are in the subject call the amendments wild. It is supposed to remove article number 38, which speaks of a service for the protection of the rights of people with psychiatric disorders. At the same time, the deputies refer to the fact that in the regions there is actually no such service, which means that the norm did not work anyway. This is largely true. But Federmesser, in response to this, explains that the service did not work because it was not prescribed how it could function, what its financing could be. That is, it was necessary to register all this in by-laws. Meanwhile, even under the conditions that were possible within the framework of the law, the service was able to start working in Nizhny Novgorod. And it helped save many lives.

In general, it is an amazing thing: social activists fought for the emergence of norms regulating the activities of the service, for ensuring that such structures become mandatory in every region, but instead the article on the service itself is abolished!

“What is happening is terrible and embarrassing,” says Federmesser. – With this approach, PNI will no longer differ from the islands of Valaam, Sviyazhsk, Solovki … where after the war they brought cripples and left them to die so that the victorious people would not be upset by the sight of “flat irons” … What to do? Just shout that amendments are being adopted to the law that distort all meanings, all the words about inclusion and patient orientation, which do not protect people, but give the country’s psycho-neurological boarding schools and their directors the right to hegemony, violence and dehumanization. Amendments that legitimize the lack of rights of those who already have nothing left – residents of boarding schools and orphanages.

The problem of PNI has been raised frequently in recent years. There are many stories of patients dying of hunger and suicide there. And all because they do not want to deal with them. Federmesser gives the example of a 21-year-old girl who weighed 19 kg. In PNI No. 10 in St. Petersburg, she was starving because she could not eat food in the usual way. From hunger, she beat herself, for which she was tied up. And she continued to lose weight. Because no one thought of how to properly feed her. Having learned about Nastya, her guardians took her away, began to feed her from a cone bag, with what cream is squeezed onto cakes, and she began to recover, stopped beating herself. She lives, although according to forecasts she should have died a long time ago.

PNI personnel often decide not to mess around with “nuts”. Lock, tie. And that means leaving to die.

I don’t know if the deputies understand that trouble can happen in every family and a seriously ill child is born, that they themselves, in old age, for example, after a stroke, can end up in such PNIs. Apparently not much. But life is a good teacher.