Talking about the Catalan Mental Health Congress Foundation means talking about a commitment to people, which stems from a very specific way of understanding mental health as an unavoidable premise for a dignified life and as a claim that goes beyond material conditions, as it is conceived, above all, as a right that all human beings have.
And it is from here that the Foundation's commitment to people living in situations of oppression and injustice must be understood, such as those experienced by people living in the Gaza Strip, where the hopelessness, fear, misery, and extreme violence of the Israeli blockade have caused irreparable harm to the mental health of entire generations, as the admired Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad el Sarraj explained so well in the documentary In the mind of Gaza, produced by the Foundation and which I had the privilege of co-directing with the filmmaker Carles de la Encarnación in 2009.
Only from this transgressive conception of mental health as a right can it be understood that the Foundation has dedicated one of its biannual Congresses to a topic as intrinsically human as migrations and lexile at a time when the European Union and its member states were brazenly and savagely embarking on the construction of a fortress that has turned the Mediterranean Sea into the deadliest border on the planet. And it is only from this unequivocally human position that one can understand the Foundation leading an initiative such as the legal challenge filed before the Court of Justice of the European Union, contesting the ignominious agreement the EU signed, together with Chancellor Angela Merkel, with Turkey to militarize the Turkish coast and prevent people from moving to Europe. It was months of intense work alongside organizations like the Catalan Association of Democratic Lawyers and Lafede.cat to advance global justice and, also, to make effective the right of organized people to do what we believe we must do from a commitment to dignified life and human rights. Anything else would be to condemn ourselves to struggle with powerlessness from the privileged position we hold by sheer injustice.
Arantza Diez, journalist