The government has filed a bill aimed at reforming Argentina’s 2010 mental health law. The proposal includes a provision aimed at loosening norms that currently restrict involuntary hospitalizations of people with mental health conditions.

According to the national government, it will simplify the process of hospitalizing people in high-risk situations “in order to prevent homicides, suicides, and assaults on others resulting from the inability to receive timely and appropriate treatment.”

The topic is at the center of a debate within the mental health community. 

Those backing the reform say it will make it easier to hospitalize people who represent a danger to themselves and others, which is currently limited to cases of imminent risk.

Critics, on the other hand, state this would go against the individual’s rights and move back towards a system focused on institutionalization, seeing mental health conditions as a disease that must be cured. 

“There is a mental health epidemic, and this reform will not solve that. It will be a huge setback,” said psychologist and lecturer Daniela Gasparini, adding that mental health treatment prior to 2010 was far from ideal.

“They were locked up and, far from getting better, they got worse and worse.”

The 2010 law has a strong focus on human rights and limited involuntary institutionalizations to critical situations in which risk is “concrete and imminent” — meaning the person has to be actively threatening their life or others for a team of professionals to sign an admittance form.

The law also banned the creation of new mental health facilities, instead promoting providing mental health care in general hospitals and adapting existing ones to become general-care facilities to avoid........

© Buenos Aires Herald