null Poster on the rights of psychiatric patients

The fact that no information material that could be understood by those with psycho-social disabilities is available these days violates the right of those patients to a fair procedure who receive emergency psychiatric treatment, and this also hinders the enforcement of the rights of these persons to legal remedy. At the same time, it runs counter to Article 14 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) 14, as well as the requirement of reasonable accommodation as defined in Article 2. This was established by the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights in his report No. AJB-305/2017, in which he requested the Director General of the Integrated Legal Services Office to ensure that their 2014 publication entitled “Information on the Rights of Psychiatric Patients” be available to the persons with psycho-social disabilities in an easy to understand version, with simplified content as well.

With a view to realizing the recommendation, a working group was established with the participation of the Office of the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights, the Integrated Legal Services Office, the Hungarian Psychiatric Association and the Lélekben Otthon (Home for the Soul) Foundation. The working group had three ideas about the form of providing such information: one would be a block of papers that can be torn off one by one, in which there would be a minimum amount of information and the key topics would be discussed very briefly and to the point, drafted especially for psychiatric patients; a poster with a slightly richer content, which may be of help even to the family members of the patients; or through the adaptation of the 2014 publication entitled “Information on the Rights of Psychiatric Patients”, which is still available. The work process on the “poster” version has already been closed. This version, which had been approved by each participating organization, was prepared by the Integrated Legal Services Office in 200 copies, and the posters will soon be distributed to the patients’ rights representatives so that they could display them in the emergency psychiatric departments that belong to their respective areas of operation.

The poster can be viewed and downloaded here