Patrick Allegaert
FROM BATTLESHIP TO RUIN
The History and Future of Life in a Psychiatric Institution
At the first general conference for the mental healthcare sector organised by Flanders (March 2019), life in a psychiatric building was an important topic: ‘Institutions like this one are designed for people who don’t fit in society. But there is no longer enough space for the original target group’, says Werner Peinen, the head of the department De Vallei at Bethanië Psychiatric Centre in Zoersel, Belgium (De Morgen, 14 March 2019). People used to be put into what was known as an ‘asylum’, an institution that functioned like an island, far from society. In recent years, this segregation of psychiatric patients has increas ingly been called into question. The legal clause called ‘Article 107’, introduced in Belgium in 2002, states the intention to do more to ‘socialise’ such patients. In other words, it is desirable to get pa tients to participate in the ordinary life of society again as quickly as possible, letting them live among other people in the city. That is the idea behind outpatient home care: psychiatric nurses or psychologists visit patients at home. But an opposing trend was discussed at the conference. Peinens explains: ‘We have experi enced on more than one occasion that a patient released from here turned up at our door again ten months later, because the combi nation of loneliness and poverty had become too much for them. So they give up their own home in favour of a place ruled by chaos, where there is sometimes filth on the floor, where there is shouting at night, where they have to live with 39 other people every day.’ It is surprising to be confronted with a kind of paradox of inclusion and the ‘socialisation’ of care: the ‘traditional asylum’ still accommodates people with a psychiatric vulnerability, contrary to the ambitions of policy. Particularly for people with a serious and long-term condition, those in charge of therapy claim that this is sometimes the practical possibility that works best.
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