Macedonia -MENTAL HEALTH INFO

MENTAL HEALTH PROMOTION AND AWARENESS RISING

Stojan Andonov, Macedonia - NGO Welcome presentation at the III SEE MH Policy Forum in Sofia - Bulgaria 2006

The concept of mental health promotion has been developed primary for improvement of mental health services, and moving towards the new concept of mental health treatment in the community.
It understands a summary of various activities for overcoming obstacles that people with mental health disorders have to face everyday. The early objectives were a comprehensive revision of the existing psychiatric services directed towards establishment of tighter links with the users in the community, at the same time by an easy approach, increased quality of services and better social integration and decreasing of the stigma, represents the imperative of today’s time.
The promotion of mental health is being conceptualized with the imposed need for actualizing the condition of the services for the people with mental health problems, emphasizing the needs of people with longer stay in the psychiatric hospitals.
In many countries this concept contributed to improvement, and even humanizing of the mental health system. There are different types of associations, organizations or groups of people that are active in this direction, for example:

* Nongovernmental organizations in the field of mental health,
* Groups of users of services and their families
* Institutions and organizations for human rights

In the course of the last years, these organizations have become more and more active and capable in their work, more and more promoting the concept of treatment in the community as an alternative in the mental health care.
As a result of these processes, the organizations that work in this field actively participate in promotion and application of the new concept of mental health treatment in the community with an evident support from the common population, the professionals in the field of mental health, and more and more governmental institutions, which more often and independently undertake activities. Since recently, more and more this term means promoting of the needs and rights of each person that has had some kind of a psychological crisis, even promotion of the mental health for the whole population.
According to WHO, the popularization of the representation has evidently contributed to changes in the mental health systems in some countries, and the success of the fight against discrimination of these people.
The main activities that are implied under representation are: increasing of the awareness and informing of the common population in the area of mental health, disseminating of information, education, training, forming of groups for self assistance, counseling, mediation and protection of human rights...
These activities are meant for crushing of various barriers such as: lack of adequate mental health services, inadequate financial system for these services, stigma associated with mental disorders, lack of promotional activities, violations of the human rights, lack of programs for housing and employment, non-adequate implementation of the mental health programs…the reduction of these barriers will lead towards an improvement of the public attitude towards these people, putting mental health on the government’s agenda, and final improvement/adoption of official government documents/attitudes that will promote the approach towards the mental health in the community and will legalize the right to have a right for forming of mental health services in the community. In this way, the users of services started to act in an organized way and to ask for services in an organized way in accordance with their needs, and to be more involved in the decision making processes.