A glance outside, the world from a different angle

In Italy the psychiatric institutes have long been closed, but in some Eastern block countries they are still operative. A psychiatric patient is often isolated and needs help even just to hope for freedom one day. In Albania the S. Egidio community and its volunteers are working towards just this.

The story of the S. Egidio community in Albania has its beginning in 1990. It was the first non-governmental Western organisation to gain stable entry to the country at the dusk of Enver Hoxha’s national-marxist era. Since then various projects, most of which are still in progress now, have taken shape through S. Egidio: programmes for the education of children, the care of sick people, social assistance in the poor quarters of the city of Tirana and of other more distant cities. One activity in particular has turned out to be an excellent pilot project for future initiatives. This project concerns the care given by S. Egidio volunteers in the chronic psychiatric ward in Tirana hospital, where, thanks to the collaboration of the local health authority, it has been possible to activate a programme of improvements of the living conditions of the ward’s 25 chronic patients. The hygiene conditions on the ward are far from European standards, the reasons for which are numerous and of various nature. The problem depends partially on poorly qualified nursing staff and insufficient economical resources; a further cause, perhaps of even greater impact, is that during Enver Hoxha’s regime psychiatric patients were considered results of an error, a mistake which did not belong to the social reality of the country. The psychiatric pretext was also used as a justification for imprisoning adversaries and political opponents, and the patient ended up completely isolated and emarginated. Over the years this attitude towards the phenomenon of psychiatric illness became so deeply rooted in the social tissue that even today, apart from medical staff, families and the relevant authorities, little has changed in common people’s attitude. After the initial actions inside the hospital, in order to further improve the situation, in 2004 S. Egidio community opened a family house in the centre of Tirana to accommodate 5 chronic patients who were clinically suitable for de-hospitalisation. The family house, the first of its kind in Albania, has become the World Health Organisation’s model for treatment protocols and guide-lines in relation to psychiatric patients. Albania in its turn has become one of the very few European countries to have given such speedy follow-up to paper-based indications. Once transferred to the family house, the patients were cared for by specialised Albanian staff, employed and trained through periodical meetings by Italian volunteer doctors from S. Egidio. The patients gradually regained some of the habits lost in hospital, normal activities such as getting dressed in one’s own clothes, eating with cutlery and making regular use of bathroom facilities. But the true additional value of this initiative lies in the fact that the patients progressively began to resume recreational and social activities amongst themselves and with the volunteers. In this way the patients, who were living at the very limits of the human condition in hospital, were gradually reintegrated into a more human and normal social context. The results achieved by the family house were so encouraging that the WHS is planning to open one itself, and the S. Egidio community is working to ensure that a second will follow the first. A great part of the work of S. Egidio is made possible by its volunteers, who use their holidays to dedicate themselves to these projects and who constitute the true operational engine of the community.