Assessment of community mental health centres in Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of the ongoing mental health reform.

In summary it seems reasonable to state that around 5000 individual service users are visiting the CMHCs in Bosnia and Herzegovina during one week. Approximately 60% of them have mental health problems, around 25% come for non mental medical disorders and around 15% are healthy and come for check ups or certificates. The average CMHC cater for about 65,000 inhabitants with a staff of one psychiatrist, three nurses and 0.7 psychologist and social worker respectively. Most of them have training for tasks within mental health services. The progress of the mental health reform is positive with more CMHCs opened, and basically staffed with trained personnel. They offer a variety of services practiced with a modern strategy. Most personnel has changed their attitudes to mental health itself and the relevant service provision and hence devoted to implement the mental health reform. They would like to have more influence on decision making and present constructive suggestions for future service and policy improvements. The service users are almost all of them very satisfied with the service provided.

European snapshot homeless survey: results of questions asked of passers-by in 11 European cities.

Passers-by were interviewed outside McDonalds restaurants in 11 European cities during November and December 1998. Eight questions were asked, mainly exploring the stigma levels of a particularly socially and economically excluded group (homeless people) and also the preferred remedies for homelessness. Answers varied, especially between the countries in Western Europe and those in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Stigma levels were very high in Bucharest, Kiev and Zagreb, presumably making resettlement work difficult. People in these cities saw homeless people as 'dangerous': repositories of infectious disease and likely to make unprovoked attacks. Most passers-by also believed homeless people were under threat, especially from the police, sometimes from other passers-by, from exposure to the winters and, in Cambridge, Vienna and Zagreb, from malnutrition. Suggested remedies were increased employment, improved training and increased affordable housing, rather than the imprisonment of beggars.