The World Health Organization’s Mental Health Action Plan 2013–2020 stipulates human rights as a cross-cutting principle (WHO, 2013) and foresees global targets to update policies as well as mental health laws in line with international and regional human rights instruments. The international human rights agreements repeatedly refer to health, including mental health. The most pertinent provisions related to mental health are enshrined in the 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which sets out human rights in an accessible and inclusive fashion to ensure the equal participation of persons with disabilities. The inconclusive description of disability in the treaty overtly refers to ‘mental impairment’ as part of an explicitly evolving understanding of disability. This text sketches some of the underlying concepts as they apply to the realm of mental health: non-discrimination of persons with disabilities and measures that should be taken to ensure accessibility in a holistic understanding; removal of social and attitudinal barriers as much as communication and intellectual barriers but also institutional hurdles. The CRPD’s paradigm shift away from framing disability mainly through deficits towards a social understanding of disability as the result of interaction and focusing on capacity is the core on which the provision of mental health services at community level to enable participation in society shall be ensured. Questions of capacity, also to make decisions and the possible need for support in so doing, are sketched out.

Global Mental Health, Cambridge Journal, Volume 3

An ICRC campaign highlighting the effects of destroying health care facilities:

© ICRC campaign on health service protection

The School of Nursing and Human Sciences at Dublin City University hosted an interactive conference where speakers, performers and conference participants will explore the prevailing impact of dysfunctional oppressive communication patterns on marginalised communities.

A report on the Mental Health Trialogue Network Ireland (MHTNI) a community development initiative in Irish mental health was launched. The Network aims to empower communities in Ireland to become proactive in communicating about mental health through an open dialogue and participatory process called ‘Trialogue’.

Big report in the NYTimes on universal coverage of health care “in dirt-poor country,” Rwanda.

NYTimes columnist Judith Warner discusses the situation of persons with varying forms of depression in the United States of America. As a new  study finds that those who do get treaty do not get treated properly and many others receive no treatment at all, Warner holds: “This is the big picture of mental health care in America: not perfectly healthy people popping pills for no reason, but people with real illnesses lacking access to care; facing barriers like ignorance, stigma and high prices; or finding care that is ineffective.”

The effect of social barriers, such as stigma and ignorance cannot be overestimated. Equally, access to affordable quality health care – a human right – is fraught for many around the globe.

Students at Harvard’s Medical School are challenging the ties between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry, or more specifically the influence that such ties have on the teaching of some professors at HMS, reports the IHT.

Seems like a good poignant time to revisit the Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in relation to Access to Medicines as spelled out by outgoing Special Rapporteur on the (human) right to health, Paul Hunt.

The Preamble highlights that “Almost 2 billion people lack access to essential medicines; improving access to existing medicines could save 10 million lives each year, 4 million of them in Africa and South-East Asia.” Acknowledging that it is the States who bear the primary responsibility to ensure access to the highest attainable standard of health – and therewith medicines – the Guidelines stress that “Pharmaceutical companies, including innovator, generic and biotechnology companies, have human rights responsibilities in relation to access to medicines.”

The NYTimes features a portrait of Alberto Cairo, an Italian physiotherapist who has run the Red Cross’ orthopedic rehabilitation center in Kabul since 1990. The Center has provided protheses to nearly 90.000 people who have mainly been disabled due to injuries sustained from the decades of warfare, which have also left behind some 10 milion mines. “Mr. Cairo, slim, affable and an energetic enthusiast of tennis, rarely shows the edginess that wears away at the most courtly of foreigners under stress in foreign lands. But a rare impatience shows when the people who know what he has accomplished suggest that he has become a legend here. Rather, Mr. Cairo says it is he, more than his Afghan patients, who has been the greatest beneficiary of his years in Kabul,” reports the Times.

The WP reports on plans by the Bush administration in the United States of America to protect doctors, nurses and other health-care workers from having to perform services, which violate their personal beliefs, such as abortions. Those hospitals and other medial institutions, which refuse to accommodate personnel who refuse to perform services that they object to for personal reasons, could see their (public) funding withdrawn. 

A similar discussion has been underway in Slovakia, one of the few countries that has a far reaching concordat with the Vatican.