Twenty years ago, coinciding with the very year the Catalan Mental Health Congress Foundation was established, on February 11, 12, and 13, 2000, my dear friend Valentín Barenblit—then director of the Organizing Committee of the Segundo Coloquio Interdisciplinar. Transformaciones. Psicoanálisis y Sociedad, organized in Barcelona by iPsi—invited me to participate. At that time, I was Manager of Psychiatric Care and Mental Health of the Catalan Health Service, and I decided to reflect, from the perspective of a public manager, on the role that the psychoanalytic model could play in the transformation of public psychiatric care in Catalonia. I was aware that my opinion would be controversial at the time, but I was, and remain, convinced of the importance and significance that the approach to mental disorders, under psychoanalytic understanding and vision, should have in the future of psychiatric care in our country. I have reviewed that paper on the occasion of the collaboration that Víctor Martí very kindly proposed to me for the 20th anniversary of the creation of the FCCSM, and sincerely, I believe that is how it has been.

HTwenty years have passed since September 14, 2000. Many of the people who, a year prior, promoted the interdisciplinary call for the First Catalan Congress on Mental Health, would a few months later achieve the milestone of obtaining unanimous support from the four professional colleges for the establishment of the FCCSM. The results, twenty years later, are clear. One only needs to review the collection of activities carried out: 71 events organized (conferences, congresses, meetings, and round tables); 3 awareness campaigns; 25 debate forums; 22 seminars and training and awareness courses in Mental Health; 8 projects in Research and Innovation; 8 consultancy and advisory documents; 4 community intervention projects; 25 international participation and cooperation programs and projects; 27 publications and/or communications, and finally, 14 participations in different working groups, festivals, and platforms in defense of Mental Health in Catalonia.

MBeyond molecules and new psychotropic drugs, some of which are obviously essential, the accumulated experience, contributed and shared by the Catalan Mental Health Congress Foundation, after 20 years, clearly shows that we cannot accept the theory of a single thought in the preventive and therapeutic approach to mental illness in any way.

CJosep Ramos writes in a paper published in Update Psiquiatría 2000: “The object of intervention of Psychiatry cannot be approached from a trivial conception (known inputs, we know all outputs). The mind is brain and it is also traditions, family interactions, culture and ethnicity, gender, genotype and phenotype.”.

Josep Ballester Roselló
Doctor. Director of the Healthcare Area, Mutuam Group
Vice President, Foundation for Mental Health of Catalonia
Secretary of AIS - Attention and Research on Addictions

Vilassar de Dalt, May 14, 2020