The health reports prepared by primary care doctors for Valencian schoolchildren and which must be presented to schools and institutes at the beginning of each educational stage will, starting in the next academic year, have a brief report or comments on mental health. This was announced this Tuesday by the director of the new Mental Health and Addictions Office, Bartolomé Pérez Gálvez. The objective, he has clarified, is to detect “small symptoms” to alert parents and teachers and “not major pathologies.” He points out that it will be the family doctor himself who makes this small report.
This psychiatrist, who was a senior official in different departments of the PP between 1995 and 2005 and was in charge of designing the mental health program of the popular Valencians for the regional elections of the last 28-M, has highlighted the importance of the detection and prevention of this problem that has placed the Valencian Community as the second in Spain in problems of depressive disorders and the first in additions (with worrying data both for cannabis consumption and for abusive Internet use).
An announcement that Pérez Gálvez has made after the first meeting of the Interdepartmental Commission for the Coordination of Mental Health, chaired by the second vice president, Susana Camarero, and attended by the Ministers of Health, Marciano Gómez, and the Minister of Education, José Antonio Rovira.
Pérez Gálvez has also pointed out that technical teams will be created in each health department to guide teachers in the face of detected problems: “We cannot waste time on protocols,” he stated. The new head of Mental Health of the new Consell has made clear his distance from the previous commissioner, Rafael Tabares, and has promised that before the end of the year, the new executive will have the Mental Health Plan drawn up.
