Abstract |
The following paper concerns the way in which the reform efforts at Leros Psychiatric Hospital began, in the early ’80s. The “group of Leros”, that consisted of doctors and a psychologist who happened to be located at the island due to their occupation, started a process of change through the publication of the prevailing situation.
This research is not only about the process of change, as well as the perspective of the people who started this process. This is a history of psychiatric reform in Leros, not as focused on the facts as on their evaluation by the group of these people.
Leros is not treated as an isolated incident; the prevailing situation that time in Leros was representative of the official Greek psychiatry and was its creation. Consequently, the efforts for reform did not concern exclusively the asylum of Leros, but the Greek psychiatry as a whole.
This is a qualitative research, flexibly designed, with unstructured interviews as a research tool and the sample consisting of the majority of the living members of the group. The subject selection is partly a result of my personal involvement with the psychiatric hospital of Leros, where I have been working since 1994.
Plenty reformations have taken place over the years resulting from the mobilization of the “group of Leros”, from the intervention and financing of the reform by the European Union, and from the state policy and the dominant scientific example. The psychiatric reform was limited to improving the living conditions, rather than supporting these people in the community (at least not to the extent it required) and treating them equally. People with psychiatric experience remain marginalized, their speech remains excluded and the debate on psychiatric reform does not that much involve terms of freedom, as terms of social control.
A different perspective was also presented through the interviews. The psychiatric reform in Greece may have not occurred as it was once perceived, but now there is an example that suggests how it can be achieved; the example case of Leros can refute the ever-increasing influence of the biologically oriented example and the marginalization of social psychiatry.
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