Our tragedy with psychiatry

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IT seems there is nothing easier in Kuwait than claiming mental illness and receiving treatment for it.

The claim of depression or lack of sleep, for example, is difficult for many doctors to understand. Many people especially those in the government claim to suffer from such sicknesses and may even have a file at the psychiatric hospital and they can take benefit from this situation because they will have access to many painkillers and rare and expensive medicines that cannot be easily obtained from pharmacies, and can also get rich by selling them to addicts as sedatives or analgesic, or sending them to his country.

Also, having a file in the Neurological Hospital allows ‘the patient’ to work fewer hours and is more often than not excused for being absent from work, and if he is involved in any offense or even murder, his medical file and the sedatives he takes are ready to intercede for him, and help reduce penalties imposed on him as his medical file will come to his aid.

Therefore, we find that the percentage of those registered as psychiatric patients at the neurological and psychiatric hospitals in Kuwait may be the highest in the world not because we were exposed to events that disturbed our minds and affected our psyches but because there is a good percentage of such patients in these hospitals who are not really sick, but have other reasons to claim they are sick.

There are many examples of people who have taken advantage of files at the psychiatric hospital to commit crimes, including murders, and then claimed the act was committed when the person was not in his senses and is often released and sent to the Psychiatric Hospital for treatment, after serving a relatively short period of time in prison, and some of them end up giving interviews to newspapers and complain about society doing injustice to them.

With these words, we are not trying to abandon our humaneness, as some of these patients may be real psychopaths, and are not responsible for their actions, but how can we accept their presence among us, while they are in this condition?

Therefore, it is very necessary to form a committee, from outside the Ministry of Health, to review psychiatric files and eliminate corrupt ones. Until that happens, if it happens, we have to be patient with our afflictions.

e-mail: [email protected]

By Ahmad alsarraf

This news has been read 11058 times!