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Mental healthcare in Poland

Part of: BJPsych International Country Profiles Collection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Jacek Bomba
Jacek Bomba*
Affiliation:
Psychiatry, Jagiellonian University Collegium Medicum, Kopernika 21 A, 31 501 Kraków, Poland, email [email protected]
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Abstract

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Modern mental healthcare in Poland has its foundations in the 19th century, when the country was subject to three different organisational and legal systems — of the Austrian, Prussian and Russian Empires. These differences prevailed even after the First World War. Professionals lobbying for a mental health act had no success. The Second World War left mental healthcare with significant losses among its professional groups. More than half of all Polish psychiatrists lost their lives; some of them were exterminated as Jews, some as prisoners of the Soviets. The Nazi occupation in Poland had dramatic consequences for people with a mental disturbance, as Action T4 turned into genocide on the Polish territory. The majority of psychiatric in-patients were killed. After the Second World War, the mental health system had to be rebuilt, almost from scratch. Major political changes in the country across the second part of the 20th century and revolutionary changes in mental healthcare around the world influenced psychiatric services. The purpose of this paper is to describe mental healthcare in Poland today.

Type
Country Profile
Information
International Psychiatry , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 10 - 12
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2008

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