Learning from each other: Rene Keet talks about how to connect mental health services in Europe

The six principles of community-based mental health services in Europe – this was the topic of Rene Keet’s talk, Medical Director of Noord-Holland-Noord and chair of EUCOMS, when he visited Pfalzklinikum on their international summer festival “Mental Health Day” on 10 June.

Pfalzklinikum is a mental health service provider in the Palatinate with a catchment area of 1.4 million inhabitants in the Southwest of Germany. EUCOMS stands for “European Community based Mental Health Service Providers Network”. It is a group of provider organizations that focus on the question how people can use the support of the society and how the great variety of community based services in Europe can be interconnected.

According to Rene Keet, the basis for care is, amongst others, Human rights – foremost the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – and public health in general. Important is also to fight against stigmatization by bringing people with and without mental illnesses and disabilities together, Keet said. For users of care services it is also important to pursuit individual goals and to focus especially on their strengths, their social networks and peer support.

In a short presentation with the title “Each of us – everyone is part of the solution”, a campaign of Mental Health Europe, Pfalzklinikum’s CEO Paul Bomke corrected ten myths about people with mental illness and disabilities and connected the campaign to the EUCOMS principles. One of them was the claim that mental illnesses are not curable. Here, he explained that recovery is possible with the right care – focusing on mental health services in the communities.

For further informtion about Pfalzklinikum, please visit: https://www.pfalzklinikum.de/home/