Yonay Alonso, a 21-year-old from Lanzarote, spoke this Thursday at the plenary session of the Cabildo of Lanzarote to request improvements in the care of psychiatric patients at the José Molina Orosa Hospital.
Alonso denounced in his speech that "when a psychiatric patient goes to the hospital in full crisis, they enter through the same door as other patients and there is no adequate space or access for those people with anxiety crises or psychotic episodes."
Faced with this, the young man assures that the most common response that is usually given is through "sedation or mechanical restraint because I have found my mother tied to a stretcher." "Is that the solution we can offer?" he asked.
Alonso has once again requested, after denouncing it on social media, the incorporation of a doctor specialized in Psychiatry on call in the Emergency Room 24 hours a day. "If someone arrives with a heart attack, they are treated immediately, but if it is a mental health crisis they can wait hours or even a day without being seen by a specialist," he says.
In addition, he continued saying that the Psychiatry Unit of the Molina Orosa "has very few beds, when there are no places patients end up on a hospital floor without television, without activities and without stimuli that favor their recovery and when they manage to enter they find a deteriorated space where all their freedoms are taken away."
"I am not here only for my mother, but for all the families who are going through the same thing and have no one to listen to them because it is sad that for all the concerts that are being held on this island they look for money even under the stones, but in health and mental health it takes years to get projects off the ground," he defends.
The young man concluded by saying that "we cannot continue to allow mental health to be the great forgotten one because mental health cannot continue to be invisible, put aside political colors and concerts because people do not need so much partying, what they need is help."