In later seven years a delegation made up of fifteen Japanese mental health workers visited the Community Psychiatric Service of the University of Verona for study.
Niki Mamoru as international exchanges delegate of an important Japanese peer support society which favours the psychiatric patients headed the delegation. The delegation was made up of psychiatrists, social workers, nurses and psychiatric rehabilitation workers. Ten years ago Tatsuya Fujii, Professor of the Sophia University of Tokyo, made contact with Lorenzo Burti, a Professor of Psychiatry of the University of Verona, for his experience of community psychiatry acquired since 1978, year of the psychiatric reform. After a seminar on the psychiatric reform and on its application in the present web of services, the delegation visited the Centre of Mental Health of the University Psychiatric Service and the premises of the San Giacomo Self-Help. The delegation met workers and users. The following day, the delegation departed and went to visit the services of Trieste, an other Italian historical seat of psychiatric innovation.
Lorenzo Burti affirms: “The Japanese psychiatric system is typically hospital–centred, with a great number of beds, it is very different from the western health care models and especially from the Italian system. Most of the Japanese innovative workers are very interested in the organisation of the Italian mental health services. Professor Fujii visits the Psychiatric Service of the University of Verona every year. He also stayed for a long time in order to study the San Giacomo Self-Help project. This is an innovative project, promoted more than twenty years ago. Today the San Giacomo Self-Help service makes it possible for the psychiatric patients, organised in a co-operative, to co-operate with the Mental Health Department of the Ulss 20. The aim of this project is the promotion, the social settling in and the employment of the patients".
14.11.2014
