Mental Health and Legislation in Chile

Date: 24 April 2024

Time: 8AM (EDT)/1PM (GMT)

Chair: Lisa Cosgrove

Location: Zoom https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/96540727782 

Recent decades have seen the rise of mental health speak in the general population and social media.  Even though most is done with the best intentions, this cultural change poses many questions and potential dangers that have been completely marginalized.  During this time awareness and anti-stigma campaigns have presented the story of mental health as the same as physical health, however there are qualitative differences that are overlooked.  One aspect that must be taken into account and that influences the cultural, scientific, clinical, social and even philosophical zeitgeist is the interplay of diagnosis and identity.  What happens in this diad and how it influences each and every aspect of our society, even when we are not completely aware of this, will be the topic of Dr Kostic’s talk.

Dr Kostic is a psychiatrist from Serbia, Head of the Day Hospital at the Institute of Mental Health in Belgrade. He completed his PhD in molecular medicine, with a focus on genetics and imaging in depression, but has in the meantime refocused his work on social and psychological aspects of diagnosis, overtreatment and overdiagnosis. Milutin is currently at the University of Massachusetts Boston on a Fulbright scholarship working with Prof. Cosgrove.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A session with members of the audience and proceedings will conclude by 9 am EDT/2 pm GMT.

On 11 April, Prof Dainius Pūras, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to the highest attainable physical and mental health, joined a panel discussion at the La Trobe Law School and the Care Economy Research Institute, Australia. The panel discussed the Transformation of Mental Health Policy, Practice, and Law in Victoria and beyond. Dainius was joined on the panel by Mary O’Hagan, Executive Director Lived Experience in the Mental Health and Wellbeing Division at the Department of Health, Victoria, and Professor Lisa Brophy, Social Work and Social Policy at La Trobe University. The panel was chaired by Associate Professor Piers Gooding from the La Trobe Law School, and guests were welcomed by Professor Irene Blackberry, Director of the Care Economy Research Institute.

While in Australia, Dainius also met with contacts at Deakin University to discuss mental health and deafness and he also presented at the University of Melbourne on mental health policy.

On 30 November 2023 Dainius Pūras, Professor at Vilnius University and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, gave a keynote address at an International Seminar on ‘‘Mental Health and Legislation in Chile: Global lessons and Experiences’. The seminar took place at the University of Chile and was organised by the Ministry of Health of Chile and Inter-American Development Bank.

The convening focused on facilitating a space for discussion, reflection and learning about experiences in mental health legislative processes, together with nationally and internationally renowned experts in the field.

Welcome speeches were given by Minister of Health, Dr Ximena Aguilera and María Florencia Attademo-Hirt, IDB Representative in Chile.

Dainius’s keynote address considered the importance of comprehensive mental health legislation to improving public mental healthcare in Chile and called for the collaboration of the various stakeholders in this process, including organized civil society, experiential experts, formally trained experts, and parliamentarians to promote the progress of the legislation.

Other speakers included an address by the Undersecretary of Public Health, Andrea Albagli, Dévora Kestel of WHO and panellists from international mental health organisations and representatives from Chile’s executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

During Dainius’s time in Chile, he also met with officials from the Ministry of Health, contacts from the School of Public Health, University of Chile and the Movement for Rights in Mental Health to discuss progress towards the introduction of mental health legislation.