Under
the guidance of health professionals, residents of Buenos Aires meet
weekly to discuss personal problems and do activities that promote
mental health. About 3,000 people participate in the program, which
operates under a public hospital. Volunteers conceive and lead the
workshops to rebuild social ties lost in the big city.
BUENOS AIRES,
ARGENTINA – The dim light of
the cafe in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, invites
confession. At a table next to a window overlooking a street corner, residents
withdraw from the autumn evening to focus on the group discussion.
Participants exchange markers to the beat of the
words. They color the mandalas distributed by Zulma Fuentes, who runs this
workshop, Puerto de Ilusiones, to promote mental health.
“You come to bare your person, knowing that others
perhaps cannot contain you, but they are not going to make you suffer.” Irma
Cichello, workshop participant
“Here we have the opportunity of expressing what we
feel and what we think,” Fuente says. “What I highlight and what I love about
this program is that it is fundamentally mutual aid. This means that we all
help each other with our experiences.”
While some talk about their problems, others color the
patterns. Coloring is a way to reduce anxiety, says Fuentes, a social
psychologist who has led this workshop for five years.
The objective of the workshop is to provide a space
where one can chat with friends. Participants meet from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. every Monday in a cafe in
the center of the city to share their experiences from the past week.
The workshop is one of many under the Programa de
Salud Mental Barrial del
Hospital Pirovano, a community organization that promotes mental health. It
operates under Hospital General de Agudos Ignacio Pirovano, a public hospital
run by the city government’s Ministery of Health.
The mental health program is unique because local
residents conceive and lead its free workshops, which offer participants the
opportunity to discuss their problems in an accepting environment. The design
also departs from past handling of mental health by promoting the complete
physical, mental and social well-being of the entire community, and not merely
preventing illness. In pursuit of this objective, the program builds community
to erode the anonymity and isolation in a big city like Buenos Aires.
Argentine psychologist Carlos Campelo launched the
program in 1985 while working in mental health at the hospital, says
psychologist Miguel Enrique Espeche, who currently runs the program. Campelo
gathered residents who had similar problems so that they could share them with
each other. In hardly a decade, the prestige of the program grew thanks to the
number of participants, the originality of the topics and the benefits for the
community.
The program now consists of 200 workshops that draw
3,000 participants in various neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and its suburbs. They meet in
unused spaces within the hospital, outdoors or in cafes to promote mental
health and to restore a sense of community in the massive city.
The program is unique because local residents, “called
animators,” conceive and lead the workshops for their fellow community members
based on topics they want to work on or share with their neighbors. The only
requirements are that they attend a three-month preparatory course and then
participate in a weekly meeting of animators to supervise their work.
In this way, the program provides an essential role
for the city's residents as promoters of their peers’ health. The animators of
the workshops are the heart of the program, Espeche says.
Fuentes emphasizes that the animators are not
coordinators.
“To coordinate consists of always maintaining an
optimal distance from the other,” Fuentes says. “To animate means to be in a
good mood, also devoting oneself [to] that role.”
About 35 people make up the Comité de Conducción, a
committee that trains and supervises the workshop animators.
The program requires just a single salary from the
state, Espeche’s. The members of the supervisory committee and the animators
are volunteers.
The breadth of the topics that animators have chosen
for workshops aims to attract all community members by focusing on the issues
that they care about, Espeche says.
“The workshops are of a wide spectrum because they are
tied to the real interests of the real neighbors,” Espeche says.
The titles of the workshops demonstrate this
diversity: “Links from solitude to harmony”; “We talk about desire, projects,
postponements and secrets”; and “How we relate with our adult children.” Other
health workshops are more physical or academic, including yoga, cinema,
literature, neurolinguistic programming, astrology and bioenergetics.
In order to participate in the workshops, residents
only need to attend an orientation meeting and then at least three meetings to
understand how the program functions, Fuentes says. Workshops are free.
“The only payment that is asked for is trust,” Fuentes
says, “that they have confidence in us. With confidence, everything is obtained.”
Martha Vázquez, a 71-year-old retired woman,
participates in the Puerto de Ilusiones workshop.
“I come here because it really satisfies me,” she
says. “I do not know what we are going to talk about, but I know that something
interesting is going to happen. And I go with the happiness of having gathered
with friends, of having chatted with them – sometimes about difficult issues,
other times we laugh.”
Another member the workshop, Irma Cichello, 68 and
also retired, values the opportunity that the workshop gives her to be
authentic and find acceptance from her peers.
“Here one comes and is oneself,” Cichello says. “One
does not have to hide anything because, among us, there are not unfavorable
criticisms. You come to bare your person, knowing that others perhaps cannot
comfort you, but they are not going to make you suffer.”
The program is also unique because it aims to promote
mental health, Espeche says. This differs from assistance or prevention because
it focuses on the population as healthy, regardless of whether people may
suffer mental illnesses during their lifetimes.
Animators stress the strengths of people, not their
weaknesses, Fuentes says.
“We are here
with our potentials, with the positive things, with the strengths,” Fuentes
says. “We work with what we have, not with the lack.”
María Emilia Holmberg, a social psychologist and
member of the program’s superviory committee, says that promoting health –
rather than treating illness – is one of the novel aspects of the program.
“What was revolutionary was that, before, the hospital
was nothing more than for sick people,” Holmberg says. “And Campelo proposed
that the hospital was also a place where healthy people could gather to talk
about their affairs, their interests, their problems, anything.”
This feature of the program initially generated some
resistance among health professionals working in the hospital, Holmberg says.
“That was also what was most difficult for
professionals of the hospital to understand,” she says. “To understand that
those people came to talk about their issues of daily life and did not come to
treat an illness.”
Florencia Ortiz is a psychologist not affiliated with
the program who is on the psychological diagnosis team at Hospital José María
Ramos Mejía, another public hospital operated by the city’s Ministry of Health.
She highlights the importance of promoting mental health and being active users
of the mental health system.
“Users should assume an active and responsible
attitude in respect to their health,” she says. “In this sense, the hospital
abandons its position of ‘master’ and moves the focus from the professional to
the user.”
As part of promoting mental health, the program aims
to restore community in the massive city.
Organizing meetings among residents aims to rebuild
social ties that the dynamics of large cities such as Buenos Aires weaken, Espeche says. People
move here from other parts of Argentina
and from other countries. Apartment buildings mean residents have many
neighbors who remain strangers rather than a few whom they get to know well.
“The large city is deficient on that level,” Espeche
says, “because there is a lot of isolation: many people who move and lose
the[ir] roots, the type of building that does not help, the public spaces are
few. So social life takes place many times through workshops.”
Ortiz recommends attending the program’s workshops to
combat the isolation of urban dynamics. The greater the isolation of people,
the more at risk and impoverished they are, she says.
Holmberg says the
program is a network of spaces where people can gather when they need to talk
to their neighbors.
“The idea is that it continues being a network,” she
says, “an island perhaps within the city, but one more resource on which people
can count when they want to meet with neighbors to address their issue. That to
me seems to be a very valuable objective.”
Programa de
Salud Mental Barrial del
Hospital Pirovano is close to celebrating 30 years of existence. But there are
no ambitious goals or grandiloquent expectations. Its main objective is to
unfold naturally, like life itself.
“One of the characteristics of the program is that it
is not alterative,” Espeche says. “We do not pretend to change anyone. For
these reasons, we also do not want to change ourselves. If we grow, better,
because the program is to accompany you.”
While Espeche says he lets time decide how much more
this network of neighbors will expand, surely some group of people are coming
together in a corner of the city to share some feature of life with their
peers.
CUANDO ASUMIMOS
NUESTRO DESEO DE EMBELLECER ESE LUGAR TAN EMBLEMÁTICO,DÓNDE EN TANTAS OCACIONES SE HOMENAJEÓ
AL FUNDADOR DE NUESTRO PSMB LIC.CARLOS E. CAMPELO SENTIMOS UNA GRAN
IMPOTENCIA. 
