You heard it in No Te Duermas
In the second part of the note, Franco Torales continued with the problem of gambling addiction in young people and pointed out the mental health area of La Matanza
Tomás Modini
@ModiniTomas
The importance of mental health
In the second part of the conversation in No Te Duermas, Franco Torales emphasized the other side of the problem: “We are not working only on gambling addiction. Gambling addiction is another part of mental health but we proposed to generate public policies that tend to take care of the social well-being of adolescents and young people. On the one hand, prevention, which we have to work with communication, culture, sports, providing them with all the possible tools so that young people have spaces for discussion. On the other hand, faced with a complex issue, intervention.”
“There are guards and the vast majority of hospitals, for example the children’s hospital, has a psychiatric guard 24 hours a day for children and adolescents. We are working, and I think we will be the first municipality to generate a program with a mental health perspective. Just as there is a gender perspective, today in La Matanza it was decided that mental health should be addressed in the programs,” he said.
In line with this, he explained that “this means that all the programs in the municipality have to have training and education on how to address mental health situations, how to work on a problem” and that “the design of sports and youth programs are coordinated with mental health specialists to think from the community level how to make the word circulate and when a problem arises within an institution, to know how to address it.”
“Pathologizing everything is not right”
In addition, the Secretary of Youth stressed: “It is understandable that a nurse, a teacher, a media outlet or whoever does not have the necessary information. So we need to generate that network and for that to multiply. Let us also understand that pathologizing everything is not right. Because a person may have a mental health problem but that doesn’t mean they have to go to therapy and be medicated. That’s wrong, it’s not working in a community way, that’s in extreme cases.”
“We believe that there should be more teams in hospitals, but the solution is community-based. Because the mental health problem that worsened after the pandemic, with the virtual use of devices and many complications and frustrations that we all go through and that luckily can manifest itself much more today, generated many problems in institutions and schools. And we understand that there are no specific professionals,” he said.
Field work
In the final part of the interview, Torales was asked about the field work and he replied that “luckily the Ministry of Health has an excellent team, and they have been working jointly with the organized community and with the institutions. Fernando (Espinoza) decided that it be a transversal policy in all areas. The territorial approach, at least as far as we are concerned, is to work in secondary schools, then with all educational levels.”
He also named other sectors: “Secondary schools have a team of vocational guidance workers and it is a direct line to reach the educational community, the preceptor who is always there and then we have to work with sports clubs and churches. I think any type of religion because they are the organized community in the neighborhoods.”
“We have to generate the necessary mechanisms so that the community is organized and can support each other and this happens a lot in popular neighborhoods, where lines of approach are being worked on from the community,” he concluded.
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