In Poland a basic opinion of the mental health care system is that it considers that mental disorders are illnesses and that an ill person is weaker (worse) and less useful in the social distribution of roles and tasks. Consequently, the ill are excluded from the main-stream of social life: they are deprived of jobs by an easy and early recognition of disability, and the granting of disability pensions, by civil law prohibition of marriage, criminal law ban on sexual contacts etc. A person has little chance for a just life if he/she is deprived of the possibility of working, founding a family, if he/she receives an inadequate pension, remains sexually isolated and on the margin of public life. This medical model of care includes a lot of discriminatory features in the area of human and civil rights of the mentally ill. The discussion concentrated on selected features of the crisis in world psychiatry as well as the practical, ideological, clinical, institutional and organizational difficulties of Polish psychiatry. The main goal of this paper is the raising of psychiatry's awareness of its faults, in order to induce the creation of a new system of mental health care, free of the discriminatory stigmas of the ill and more adequately adapted the ideas of a contemporary democratic state.

Civil Rights↗

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[Does restriction of sexual freedom according to article 169 of the Penal Code serve the mentally ill?].

Article 169 of the penal code imposes a ban on sexual contacts with a person, who is fully or to a significant degree deprived of the ability to recognize the meaning of his/her actions or to control his/her behaviour. A partner of a mentally retarded or mentally ill person, who engages fully in biologically and culturally appropriate sexual activity, can become criminally liable, receiving up to 10 years of freedom loss. The freedom of the insane and persons with strongly diminished mental ability is supposed to be a protected "good". The Polish Psychiatric Society tabled a motion in favour of abolishing this regulation, but the penal code reform committee did not accept this postulate. It is worth noting that sexual partnership constitutes both for men and women an irreplaceable human right. Nature itself does not exclude the mentally ill from the mystery of life which is unpredictable in its destiny. It should be added that some of the mentally ill identify hope for further living with the hope of keeping an intimate partnership.

Female↗

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[Criteria for, and attending difficulties of forensic psychiatric expert testimony in cases of legal conflict].

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Commitment of Persons with Psychiatric Disorders↗