New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Claire Wang (王婉諭) on Thursday proposed an amendment to the Mental Health Act (精神衛生法) in the hope of providing better community services for people with mental illness.
The law, enacted about two decades ago, aims to assist people to live independently and ultimately reintegrate with society, but does not spell out how the government is to help communities to accommodate people with mental illness, she said.
Wang said that her proposal clarifies the kinds of social support that people with mental illness need and increases the standards of services offered by communal mental health centers.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
A system for assessing people’s needs would be set up and local government units would be encouraged to increase cross-department collaboration, she said, adding that the amendment would legally mandate regular doctors’ visits for people with mental illness.
However, the array of psychological conditions makes it difficult to establish a unified standard for community-level services, the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Department of Mental and Oral Health Director Chen Li-chung (諶立中) said.
Meeting the needs of people with mental illness requires public health services and community support, Chen said.
Other considerations are the number of communities lacking resources and the amount of medical resources that can be donated to them, he added.
Chen voiced his support for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, but added that no nation exists where people with mental illness are not, at some point, hospitalized for treatment.
Due to the nature of mental illness, some people cannot discern that they are experiencing an episode, while others only lose some functionality in their daily lives, which adds to the difficulty of setting a unified standard, Chen said.
“Some people lack the insight that they are ill, which makes it difficult to treat them,” he added.
Mental health professionals around the world are trying to solve this problem, but some things are not a simple matter of implementing or not implementing measures, Chen said, adding that new policies must be introduced gradually.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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