MHI's Mission
The Open Society Mental Health Initiative (MHI) aims to ensure that people with mental disabilities (mental health problems and/or intellectual disabilities) are able to live in the community and to participate in society with full respect for their human rights. MHI works in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The Community for All Initiative
The focus of MHI's activities is to end the unjustified and inappropriate institutionalization of people with mental disabilities in the target region by advocating for the closure of institutions and for the development of community-based alternatives. People with disabilities have the right to receive support in a manner that respects them as individuals and enables them to achieve self-determined and meaningful lives. This kind of support can only be provided in community settings. To this end, in 2006 and beyond, MHI will promote de-institutionalization and the development of sustainable community-based services as a matter of policy across the region, working at both national and European levels.
Over the past 11 years, MHI has provided sustained and strategic financial and technical support for the development of community-based alternatives to institutionalization in the region. MHI promotes Independent Living for people with mental disabilities. Choice, dignity, freedom, and control are the principles of Independent Living. Independent Living means ensuring that people with disabilities have the same freedom to choose as every other citizen, that they are supported in their choices, and that they have opportunities to participate in the everyday activities that people without disabilities take for granted. MHI's Grants Program aims to support initiatives that stimulate the reform of national health, social welfare, education and employment policies. MHI also provides technical assistance and training in substantive areas to its grantees. Many MHI grantees provide high-quality community-based services which demonstrate that people with mental disabilities can live in their communities when they receive appropriate support.
There is an urgent need to promote real change in government policies so that provision of services for people with mental disabilities in the community is the norm rather than the exception; such services are accessible to everyone who needs them, and governments reallocate resources that are almost exclusively invested in institutions to the provision of community-based services.
Context
People with mental disabilities continue to be institutionalized and excluded from society.
Historically, government policy across the region has been to segregate people with mental disabilities in long-stay residential institutions where the living conditions are often in clear violation of basic human rights. Membership in, or candidacy for membership of, the European Union has done little to promote the social inclusion of people with mental disabilities. In the member states of the European Union, new institutions for people with mental disabilities continue to be built despite the fact that some governments have stated their intent to close institutions.
While there are pockets of high-quality community-based services in the region, and while a number of governments have stated their intentions to move toward a community-based model, tens of thousands of people with mental disabilities are still living in institutions. There is little prospect for change in their lifetime, unless action to shift the provision of care away from the institutions is taken now. Thus, despite many positive political and economic developments across the region in the last fifteen years, the situation for people with mental disabilities is largely unchanged. This lack of forward movement is due to a number of factors:
- Governments continue to institutionalize people with mental disabilities.
- Too often, governments respond to the exposure of severe human rights abuses in institutions by attempting to improve the institutional environment.
- Donors commonly fund short term ‘solutions' rather than investing in systemic change.
Institutions have no place in civil and open societies
Institutionalization without justification perpetuates the social exclusion of people with mental disabilities and is, in itself, a violation of human rights. Segregating people, barring them from access to education and employment, denying them the right to choose where and how they live and who they associate with, solely on the basis of a mental disability label is unacceptable. The nature of institutions is, in itself, dehumanizing. The existence of institutions is an anathema to the concept of a civil and open society in which the rights of all citizens are respected.
Acknowledgements
Ratko Koletic provided the artwork for the Mental Health Initiative's website banner. The images are reprinted here with his permission.