Mental health and social transformation

Over the past decade, the transformation of Poland's socio-economic system brought new qualities to all sectors of public life, including the sphere of labour. It fostered positive values such as pluralism, democracy, and freedom, but also had negative consequences. Growing rates of poverty, unemployment, and crime, a decreasing sense of security in everyday life, are all new and distressing to a majority of Poles. Analyses based on public opinion polls indicate a decreasing sense of social and economic security and a growing sense of vulnerability to lower living standards, poverty, and unemployment. All of these factors have an impact on mental health in Poland.

Attitudes regarding mental illness

In Poland, public interest in mental health problems has been limited. This can be attributed, partly, to the political system and social attitudes toward people with mental health disorders.

In research completed in 1996,¹ over 70% of respondents indicated that, in their community, people with mental health disorders are described in derogatory terms, such as crazy, loony, idiot, abnormal, cuckoo. According to the majority of respondents, the mentally ill are more often harmed and jeered at (90%) and are more aggressive and dangerous (69%) than other people. When asked about their personal attitude toward the mentally ill, 74% of respondents described it as kind, but perceived such kindness in only 42% of people in their milieu. Respondents who know somebody with mental illness (81%) are definitely more sympathetic towards the mentally ill than those have no personal connection with someone suffering from a mental health disorder (61%). When the same research was conducted in 1999, changes in findings were statistically negligible.²

The medical treatment of people with mental health disorders has contributed considerably to the negative attitudes towards them. Traditionally, the mentally ill have been treated in large psychiatric hospitals, usually situated in little villages or isolated areas away from town centres. Hospitalisation lasted many years and separated patients from their families. The number of chronically mentally ill patients living outside of psychiatric hospitals was very small. Doctors routinely testified to their permanent inability to work. Persons with mental health disorders have therefore been perceived as incurable, incapable of leading independent lives, unable to work, and requiring special care provided in special places.

In recent years, new medical practices have been developing which stress the need for people with mental illness to be treated in community based services. Hopefully these will gradually change current popular attitudes.

The mass media in Poland seldom focuses public attention on the risks connected with the incidence of mental health disorders. Mental health issues are reported on sporadically, and their coverage tends to highlight the dramatic consequences of job loss or poverty, usually when they result in