Personas con trastorno mental grave: el éxodo tras la reforma psiquiátrica en España

Abstract

People with severe mental disorder who enter the machinery of the punitive apparatus and specifically entering prison, suffera double stigma, for the disease they suffer and for imprisonment. The psychiatric reform that occurs in Spain in the eightiesof the twentieth century, is a laudable project in his theory, which came to replace an obsolete and asilar system anchored inthe nineteenth century, but developed without alternative means. The sick people, when they closed the asylums, were doo-med to helplessness, exclusion and marginality. General hospitals could not maintain them for more than a short period oftime, a circumstance linked to the lack of family, economic, labor and social resources. All this, caused an inexorable exodusto crime. Currently, the situation of people with severe mental disorder in prison is one of the most important pending issuesof the prison system, which requires a reinforced action by Penitentiary Institutions in general, and each prison in particular, to guarantee the rights of these doubly vulnerable and vulnerable people; and to provide them with the intervention andassistance that their disease requires.