Introduction of the 2006 International Mental Health Policy Workshop

Thanks to International Mental Health Policy Workshop 2006 held in Yuli Veterans Hospital last October, many experts and professionals who are from Hong Kong, Japan, the United States, and Australia were invited to share their research outcome of psychiatric rehabilitation programs and hospitalized case studies in mental health. Furthermore, much possible extended collaboration was developing during the workshop through those excellent presentations and dialogues on the topic of community mental health.

The case of Yuli Veterans Hospital represents a continuative and appropriate long-term care service called the “Yuli Model,” in which combines hospital base with the concepts of community base in a way to solve the extensive problems from disorganism. Even though disorganism has been a significant tendency in Western long-term service, there is still no resolution to deal with negative impacts of nursing quality of psychiatric treatment. Therefore, the therapeutic community of Yuli Model is capable of an illustration used in sharing community-based hospitalization for most developing and developed countries.

Psychiatric medical treatment in Japan is famous for its comfortable hospitalized surroundings; however, to produce more and more suitable institutions is not the result for those increasingly disintegrated psychotics. In order to shape the best hospitalization, Japanese scholars examine with intensive attention on Yuli Model of not reducing hospital numbers but gradually merging into hospital-base communities.

Because of the International Mental Health Leadership Program offered by the University of Melbourne and Harvard University, Professor Harry Minas and Professor Alex Cohen have been training many seed psychiatrists and mental hygiene professionals in Southeastern Asia. Both of them are willing to support Training Workshop in Taiwan along with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Department of International Cooperation to (1) training Taiwan psychiatrists in Southeast Asia and (2) holding Outcome Research Workshop in Yuli. It will be achievable for the Yuli Model to become an object of improving psychiatric hygiene courses, as well as to be introduced through a traveling dispensary in Southeast Asia.

Relative collaborations should be continuous among many disciplines in addition to psychiatric professionals, such as sociologist, anthropologist, and health economists; moreover, what those professionals expect to challenge is their outcome research among the international dialogues. The Yuli therapeutic community model established by both Yuli Veterans Hospital and Yili town would be a significant instance for developing mental hygiene in international community.

As the director of mental hygiene department in the University of Melbourne, Professor Harry Minas would like to transmit their clinical resources in Australia for the partnership with training programs in Taiwan. Owing to the Mental Health Policy Workshop in Yuli, Alex Cohen and Byron Good, professors at the Department of Social Medicine in Harvard University, are willing to recommend bilingual scholars to visit Yuli Veterans Hospital for short-term research. They are looking forward to advocating the concept and application of Yuli Model as well as drawing into American network simultaneously for the advanced connection in the field of mental health policy.

The Yuli Model in Yuli Veterans Hospital together with Yuli Town is experimental as a result of developing a model of therapeutic community. With the collaboration among governments and an approach to link the trends of globalization and localization, its contribution results in Taiwan public health as well as an oversea academic reciprocity.