At the United Nations
NGO Committee for Mental Health
The NGO Committee for Mental Health is engaged in advocacy related to preparations at the UN for two major conferences in June. Women 2000 is a Special Session of the General Assembly in New York on 5-9 June (it is the five-year review of the UN World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995). This will be followed by a Special Session of the General Assembly in Geneva on 26-30 June, which is the five-year review of the UN World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995.
WFMH representatives were active during the 44th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women and the third session of the Preparatory Committee for Women 2000, which ran from 28 February to 17 March. As at the Beijing Conference in 1995, the aim was to encourage attention to womens mental health needs within the general consideration of womens health. The NGO Committee on Mental Health cosponsored a meeting with WHO on this topic at UN headquarters on 9 March. Benedetto Saraceno, M.D., Director of the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Control at WHO in Geneva, was the keynote speaker. He also participated in an open dialogue at UN Headquarters on 7 March on the follow-up and implementation of the Resolution on Women and Mental Health. This provided input for a WHO training manual, now in preparation, on womens mental health.
Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities
As preparations for the review of the 1995 World Summit for Social Development move ahead, the NGO Committee and WFMHs representatives at the UN intend to focus advocacy efforts around a recent report to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC): Monitoring the Implementation of the Standard Rules on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities. The Standard Rules were adopted by the General Assembly in 1993, and the report provided to ECOSOC in February 2000 was written by Bengt Lindqvist (Sweden), the Special Rapporteur on Disability of the Commission for Social Development.
This report gives limited attention to developmental and psychiatric disabilities, but it has a favorable mention of users activities at the World Congress for Mental Health in Chile in 1999. It notes: In the case of persons with psychiatric disabilities, there is no worldwide organization which represents their interests alone. One of the most urgent needs is to support the attempts made by small groups of psychiatric users to organize and create a voice of their own in more countries. The plan to develop the World Federation of Psychiatric Survivors and Users into a strong and representative world organization must get support and recognition.
The report also comments on the clear and progressive guidelines in the 1991 UN Resolution 46/119, Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and the Improvement of Mental Health Care. The rapporteur says it would be interesting to know how far Member States have come in the implementation of these guidelines, but no follow-up study has been made.