ABSTRACT
The Department of Mental Health (DSM) Rome E is one of the Italian Institutions which try to promote the achievement of preventive measures in the mental health field.
The three following areas represent the priorities: 1) the development of the “social enterprise”, 2) the de-institutionalisation process in all structures of the department and in particularly in the Diurnal Centres, 3) engagement of adolescents.
The “social enterprise” is the locus of integration, work and cooperation in which therapists, suitable patients, professional figures of working world try to create a productive activity that competes in the working market. This is quite different from the classic concept of “ergotherapy”, a procedure well known in psychiatric hospitals. The “social enterprise” represents the opportunity for patients to produce goods and services that have a real existance and that have a real remuneration, something very close to real life. The “social enterprise” creates the opportunity for the social matrix to absorb what – the mental illness- was in past rejected and this, ultimately, modifies the social representation of patients in the general population.
The continuous de-institutionalisation process implies three interdependent and complementary aspects: a) giving up the net of asylum (avoiding reproducing it in community care), b) creation of supportive net in the community to improve the opportunity for patients to achieve relationship and human rights, c) promotion of different way of thinking towards mental illness.
The DSM Rome E provides a service for adolescents which carries out systematic integration with 30 high schools of our District.
