A 47-year-old man at the Attica Psychiatric Hospital in Dafni recently killed a 44-year-old female fellow patient. He had committed a similar murder a few years ago. He escaped from the facility and was tracked down, several hours later, in a completely deranged state of mind. The incident brings back to the fore a perpetual and unaddressed problem that is only talked about when something bad happens, and this is the fact that there are just two nurses for every 30 patients at the country’s biggest psychiatric hospital. This has been the case for decades and staff liken working there to being “on a battlefield every day.”
The conditions at Greece’s prisons and public psychiatric hospitals are very much to blame for the unfortunate incidents that take place there. Overcrowding, unsuitable facilities, dramatic staff shortages and a disregard for regulations and protocols lead to all sorts of incidents, only some of which we hear about. It’s almost like a separate world in those places; a marginalized world with no voice. No one is going to take to the streets in protest when lives are lost there – they’re already considered gone.
As priorities shift almost across the planet, and cynicism, a quid pro quo attitude and the reign of digital reality all but obliterate – turning into a mere collector’s relic – the essence of the word humanism, including care for the weak, the helpless and the non-productive, who are voluntarily or involuntarily condemned to isolation, the consequences will become increasingly evident. It will become harder for a government to implement effective – not merely declarative – measures, or to commit time and resources to improving, let alone salvaging, what can still be saved.
Chaos will be dealt with haphazardly as a handful of doctors and nurses will continue to selflessly go above and beyond to keep a public psychiatric hospital running – however minimally. Even if it lacks specialized rooms with padded walls to prevent self-harm, or a video surveillance system. Even if the practice of “mechanical restraint for agitated patients” continues to be applied, under questionable supervision.
It appears that we should be happy when the bare minimum is being done – and that’s the worst thing because it’s so final. No one wants to know what comes after that: Will the death of a human being anywhere, not just in a psychiatric hospital, be so easily dismissed?