Seeds

Mental health doesn’t mean dementia but a proactive building for a better future.

 

PIURA CITY, Peru – Sunday mid-afternoon, the party is up, beers go and come, while an improvised dance floor on the sand fills with hundreds of footprints to the hot cumbia rhythm. The lyrics are not almost understandable because of the worst speakers equalization. However, while some display their best moves, others prefer to be looking at and holding the tears with a cup full of liquor in the hand.

 

“C’mon, give it that it’s warming,”  the comrades demand to an evident drunk boy. The above drinks and leaves the cup, goes looking for someone amid the crowd and complains him to be dancing with a girl.

 

The friends try to separate him unsuccessfully. The another guy face him badly. Instantly, the fight, over than declared, is a fact. The friends of the improvised contender come out to defend him and the pandemonium raises.

 

Minutes later, while the wounded go to ER at the the nearby hospital, others go to the first police station where the turn officer does the impossible for not taking the denounce. And the scene repeats almost everyday – a cosmos of unsolved complexes seem to catch the life of the Piura-natives life.

 

Without priority

“Very few people is aware they suffer from any mmental health problem in a few or high degree,” Psychiatrist Julio Castro Castro said on his radio program. The specialist, pretty known in in FACTORTIERRA because of his proactivity in conflicts like Tambograndé or Río Blanco, is not tired to repeat that the State is not giving priority to the mental health.

 

“The human being is not only the physical body but the mind and the soul,” he underlines. Dr Castro is part of a flow of people in general, including psychologists and psychiatrists, who aare trying to attract the attention on the spot.

 

They don’t get the expected results up to now: quality drugs available for every patient with mental health problems, the end of stigma against them, and policies of preventive health that face the anomie –following the rules in own convenience—to begin, which Piura community seems to be drowned.

 

More riches, less wellness

“The more frequent problems in Piura are depression and schizophrenia,” says Tomás Alacid, a nurse specialized in mental health problems, who worked at the Center of rehabilitation for Mental Patients of Piura and Tumbés (CREMPT, as its initials in Spanish). It’s a work partially held by the San Juan de Dios Hospital Order.

 

Alacid has been a volunteer who has more than two decades of experience managing those conditions,and who was even in the battle ground. He was during much time working with members of maras or gangs in El Salvador, inclusive becoming to nurse wounds of knife and bullet.

 

“Piura is much more quiet than that, but it has problems,” he comments. He is alarmed, by example, of the violence cases caused by the consumption of sugarcane schnapps at Morropón Province highlands, or with the isolation that mental health patients continue to experience in a city that presumes its economic advance although evident retreat in cultural issues – Piura. “There’s no theater here,” observed one of his workmates, coming from Spain like him.

 

Alacid, a Barcelona, Catalonya-native, distributed his time within his activities inside the CREMPT and multiple visits, inclusive with top authorities who promised much but have not made anything. However, he doesn’t lose the faith and the enthusiasm. “It’s a person who is doing remarkable things for this community,” Julio Castro has come to state.

 

On the air

But, no doubt, the Tomas heroes are patients who jumped up, no antecedents in Peru. Every Thursday at 17:00 (Lima time), Valerio, a man with Psychology studies who had to come back from Spain, and patient at CREMPT sit down in front of the microphone to host Hacia el Horizonte (To The Horizon).

 

The 1-hour-length show has been produced, written, and hosted by patients of the Day Center, a CREMPT’s assistential attention project, and that formerly ran at 9:00 as a segment of the radio Cutivalú’s ¡Corre La Cortina! (Open Wide The Curtain!) morning show. “How are you, national and international radio listener friends,” has been the classic greeting of Elena, who even has given her voice for the Christmas panettonni sales campaign of San Juan de Dios.

 

“I never would have thought that they could air the program,” opines Güido Calderón, nurse and professional manager, but a volunteer of any fair cause on the way, inclusive FACTORTIERRA, “but they do that.” Güido also has been part of the San Juan de Dios Mental Health Committee, that has proposed to put the issue in the regional agenda. (FACTORTIERRA has been part of the committee, and ending 2011, it offered a media advocacy training.)

 

Although they have got to have the attention of a former regional president or former Peru’s Vice-President Marisol Espinoza (a Piura-native for more precission), they just have given the first steps, and, although their intention is not breaking down the parties –because the silence is not precisely their sign—, they would be times to enjoy, strengthen the friendship, kill the stress, and recharge energy to work for everybody and for the department the next day.

 

It sounds like utopical but they didn’t pretend to give up. However, the first step is understanding the first building to get mental health comes from everyone like the carob seed – from a tiny thing becomes a leafy tree, endurable and strong enough to host everybody.

 

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