Global Initiative on Psychiatry – Ukraine

In 1990, FGIP, under its previous name Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry (GIP) became involved in the first attempts to change Ukrainian psychiatry from an outdated Soviet institutional and biologically oriented psychiatric care system to more modern approaches. It helped establish the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association (UPA) in early 1991, and subsequently the founding of relative organizations, an association of psychiatric nurses and the first consumer movement. It organized NGO-building trainings, and supported the NGO-sector both materially and through training. In the years 1991-1993 it transported more than three thousand cubic meters of humanitarian aid to psychiatric hospitals with trucks, Fokker airplanes of the Dutch Air Force and eventually twelve IL-76 cargo planes of the Ukrainian Air Force.

 

In 1995, GIP established, together with the UPA, the publishing house Sphere, which in the course of the next decade translated and printed 139 manuals, books and reports on modern mental health care delivery, ethics, law and human rights. From early on, GIP organized trainings for Ukrainian mental health professionals. It helped develop a curriculum in social work, developed the first training program for psychiatric nursing and set up the first Center for Psychosocial Rehabilitation in Ukraine, which functioned until 2022. Hundreds of Ukrainian mental health professionals participated in training seminars of the Network of Reformers in Psychiatry during the years 1994-2004, in mental health nursing, psychogeriatrics, alcohol- and drug-addiction, child psychiatry and community mental health care services. In 1994 GIP was one of the founders of the Kyiv-based Medical Treatment Center for Victims of Totalitarianism and Civil Wars (MRC), that continues to function until today.

 

Following the orange revolution in 2014, FGIP carried out more than half a dozen assessments of social care homes, prison mental health care services, and forensic psychiatry in Ukraine together with the Office of the Ombudsman for Human Rights of the Verkhovna Rada and the Ministry of Social Affairs. With the latter a five-year reform plan for social care homes was developed and with the Ministry of Justice a reform plan was agreed upon regarding the prison mental health care sector.

 

During the COVID-19 pandemic it supplied up top ninety mental health institutions with Personal Protection Equipment and instructions how to avoid infection.

 

Since the February 2022 invasion FGIP is actively involved in providing humanitarian aid to mental health institutions, and has developed a wide range of activities in the field of specialized psychological aid to victims of the Russian invasion into Ukraine to bridge the gap for those who cannot access regular mental health services. The programs involves training of mental health professionals, the development of safe on-line consultation programs for First Line Responders, the provision of short and clear advise to the general population through social media, evidence-based self-help information to both individuals in need of support and mental health professionals through websites, training of mental health professionals in war-related trauma issues and a crisis center for Ukrainian refugees in Lithuania, that counts approx. 80 000 Ukrainian refugees to date. The programs are a joint initiative of the FGIP with the Global Initiative on Psychiatry Tbilisi in Georgia, the Czech National Institute for Mental Health and the Vilnius Mental Health Center in Lithuania.