Club 13 &Co. has started advocacy project

  Advocacy for mental patients is an institution, well known in the world for a long time. In our country there are just seen the first steps. We are happy our Club 13&Co. to be the first to initiate and to implement the idea on mental patients advocacy.
     In our magazine The Club 13&Co. News, published since 1998, we have presented time and again articles on patients’ rights. In the autumn of 2002 we already declared to organize a work group to discuss on the problems of the rights of mental patients. Zina Samsanaviciute, a professional lawyer, was elected as a coordinator of this work group. She was trusted to collect all the necessary legal literature, codes and documents, and to study the material which might be useful to persons suffering from mental disorders.
     We have received some statements from persons, some NGO’s cooperating with us have been interested in our activities as well.
     We have started to collect the information on patients’ rights advocacy abroad. The participation in international patients’ conferences in Estonia, Poland, Germany, Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, Malta and France has served a lot in our activities, as this problem is being widely discussed during such meetings. Joining the GAMIAN-Europe (Global Alliance of Mental Illness Advocacy Networks) has also been a good step forward in implementing our ideas on advocacy project.
     We often discuss on the violation of mental patients rights during our Club’s meetings.
     While collecting information we have formulated the most important problems to be examined by the work group:

• Compulsory hospitalization or refusal to hospitalize;
• Restriction of patients rights and the breaches in psychiatric hospitals;
• Living conditions in psychiatric pensions and mental care homes;
• Relationship with employers, the restrictions in mental patients employment;
• Restriction of patients rights in everyday and social life: the right to drive, the right to own a gun, the right to make a trade deal, the right to vote, etc.);
• Influence of parents and family members, the guidance to a mental patient;
• Paternalism of professionals and interference;
• Right to care for children;
• Right to refuse medications;
• Right to inherit (once our Club has protected it’s member’s (after death) right to the volition of his inheritance);
• Right to privacy, to dissemination of information, and relations with mass media.

     We think, the representatives from the patients’ organizations should become members of governing boards of psychiatric institutions in the nearest future and their vote should be taken into account when organizing activities of the institution. The members of Club 13&Co. have already made a request to the administration of Republican Vilnius psychiatric hospital and hope that the request is going to be entertained. We are sure the hospital administration and its’ staff will cooperate benevolently with the representatives of patients’ organizations. The same cooperation is also expected from the patients. Last summer we visited Akniste (Latvia) psychiatric hospital, which looked like mental care home, and we saw a self-sustaining board of patients, solving, true, mostly problems of daily living needs.
     We have started a new section Advocacy for Mental Patients in our magazine The Club 13&Co. New. We have already told a history of NARPA, an institution advocating for mental patients in the USA. This section will be constant in our magazine. We will publish news from related organizations, present the main laws concerning mental patients rights and we will examine their breaches.
     In 2003 the Council of the Affairs of Disabled at the Government of Lithuania allocated a small grant for our Club (about 300€) to implement a project Advocacy for Mental Users – a New Institution in Lithuania, so we could start setting up particular activities. We have already signed a contract with Lithuanian Open Society Fund for the future financial support for this project (8000$) for the year 2004. We will probably also get some funding from “Hamlet Trust” (London). We are going to publish a leaflet on our activities. We are planning to look for premises in Vilnius and open an office which is going to be a meeting place for everyone interested in our activities. We will also visit psychiatric institutions in the whole Lithuania.

Danguole Survilaite,
Chairperson of Club 13&Co,
Vilnius, Lithuania