NAPLES, Italy (CI Italy) — As Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani pointed out (on the occasion of his stay in Trivigliano, at the “Community in dialogue”, where he has spent Christmas Eve for over thirty years) “to solve the problem of prisons we should make young drug addicts in communities serve their sentence, so that the punishment serves to recover the person. A place of hope, where those who have abandoned their lives to drugs and addiction can recover”, because as Antonio Tajani has always said, “politics must be ever closer to those who suffer and need.”
An assessment that invites you to linger with the penitentiaries, on subjects suffering from mental disorders and on educational poverty. “Those who are diagnosed with drug addiction – points out Prof. Leone Melillo – are already started by the intramurary SerD to a community path.
The same thing is true for people suffering from mental disorder, through the Individual Therapeutic Rehabilitation Paths (P.T.R.I.), which the territorial psychiatric services – CSM -, would be required to ensure, as the taking charge”.
Due to the failure of territorial mental health and SerDs, who have not adapted to change, in the face of a chronic shortage of beds, prisons are being filled.
Therefore, the possibility of “experimenting” subjects suffering from mental disorders and/ or drug addicts, is not a novelty in the regulatory landscape, being possible for many decades, but everything is subordinated first to diagnosis and then to resources.
Proposals which remain theoretical, because practice is not consequential. For example, most drug addicts do not go to the territorial DS or contact it but often without attending it regularly, which means not obtaining “take-over” status.
Without taking charge of the SerD, without a “documented positivity” over time to the toxicological tests, without a declaration at the entrance of the drug addiction, which involves the submission to the toxicological test.
Even those with a long history of drug addiction will not get the current diagnosis and therefore will not be followed by the intramurary SerD, nor can it be “tested in community”.
In mental health and in the field of drug addiction, the “hard core” are those subjects – unreductible – who are so ill that they do not even recognize the need for care, so they are only treated in urgency or emergency, reason why they become chronic, making themselves responsible for situations of social alarm, with grave danger to themselves and others.
Often – points out again Prof. Leone Melillo – overcrowding is also due to those subjects with a “definitive measure of security” that should not remain in a “House Circondariale”. Another issue, the vast majority of subjects “tested in an alternative security measure to prison” (from house arrest to therapeutic community), fail and return to prison.
Meanwhile, the Penitentiaries have been designed to accommodate fragile subjects, for the most disparate reasons, in the absence of adequate investments, half solution and especially in the absence of a health staff and penitentiary able to manage this complexity.”
Reflections that Prof. Leone Melillo has shared recently with Senator Andrea Ostellari and in Tirana, with Prof. Xheladin Dracini, Rector of the local Medical University, with whom “future collaborations and research projects were discussed, with particular emphasis on the importance of the role of psychiatry in monitoring and guaranteeing human rights”.
Research topic also address “educational poverty”, because as Elodie Di Patrizi – Save the Children ambassador – has highlighted it is essential to grow “adults more free, confident and happy”.
by Professor Leone Melillo in Naples, Italy. Translated from Italian