SANTIAGO – President Sebastián Piñera and Health Minister Enrique Paris announced a new mental health bill after its approval by Congress. The bill comes at a time when Chile ranks as one of the countries where mental health had deteriorated the most in 2020. Over 27 percent of the population struggles with mental health issues.
This morning, during a ceremony at La Moneda Palace, President Sebastián Piñera announced a new Mental Health bill. He emphasized the importance of the bill, especially now, with the day-to-day effects of the pandemic and lockdowns.
If the bill becomes law it would:
- Recognize and guarantee fundamental rights for people with mental illnesses or, psychological or intellectual disabilities, by establishing the state’s duty to respect and promote them.
- Protect people affected by these pathologies, especially when exercising their rights to personal freedom, physical and mental integrity, sanitary care, and social and professional inclusion.
- Specify concepts of mental health, mental illness, and people with psychological or physical disabilities.
- Regulate and guarantee each person’s decision to be informed of and choose treatment or therapy alternatives.
- Stipulate that medical attention will be available in the form of outpatient clinic or as home care, and specify that psychiatric hospitalization will be used as a temporary exceptional measure.
This means that the bill will guarantee rights and protection for people who need mental health assistance, especially in cases of clinical admission – which will be implemented only when strictly necessary – and specialists will have to respect the patient’s will to choose the patient’s own treatment.
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Another measure the government implemented is the Digital Hospital platform, which offers mental health attention via video call or telephone. This initiative offers the service of trained, professional mental health specialists who, according to the president, “provides psychological first aid, acceptance, support, love, active listening, a safe space to vent, recommendations to improve [the caller’s] emotional situation, tasks to accomplish – and all of this really, really, helps.”
This goes hand in hand with the Saludablemente project, for which the authorities announced a budget of more than CLP$1.118 billion. The project is centered mostly on pandemic-related topics, offering psychological support and guidance to different groups, divided by age, gender and more.
The president also talked about how difficult it is to acknowledge mental health issues and to access treatment and therapy. This is reflected in the numbers: 27 percent of the national population struggles with some kind of mental health issue and 38 percent have depression to some degree.
The scarcity of mental health resources in Chile has been an important topic for a long time. According to a study by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2017, over a million Chileans struggle with anxiety and 850,000 have depression. This put the country in fourth place worldwide with the highest percentages of people dealing with these issues.
Furthermore, a poll conducted by research and consulting company IPSOS put Chile in second place in terms of mental health deterioration during the pandemic, only eclipsed by Turkey.
Javiera is from Santiago de Chile, she is studying journalism at Universidad de Chile, since 2017 and doing her internship at Chile Today.