Eva María puts her hands on her head when she remembers what her life was like six years ago. Many anxiety attacks, fights with his family and a reason for constant problems: money. She suffers from severe chronic mental illness and met the requirements to live in one of the Group 5 residences set up for people in the same situation. Specifically in Sevilla La Nueva, on the outskirts of Madrid.
Since then, his daily life has changed completely. Now she has time to dedicate to herself, to enjoy with her family and friends and to participate in the workshops that the center makes available to her. You can choose among all of them voluntarily, depending on your interests and the capabilities that the social and health team sees fit to enhance in you. In his case, the plant one or the gathering one are his favorites.
The residence has 49 arranged and private places. To provide individualized care to each of the users, a total of 15 educators, a psychologist, an occupational therapist and the center’s management work. In turn, all residents are assigned a person from the professional team as a reference person with whom they have even closer contact and whom they can turn to whenever they need it.
It is important that they have someone they trust from the beginning, since the most complex thing when faced with a new admission is “the lack of knowledge of the person’s vital situation, because in the end we know very little about the protocol that the Health Center has sent us. Mental. We have this uncertainty about what their baseline state will be like, their life situation, their history,” explains Lucía Durán, occupational therapist at the center.
It is also difficult for users to change their home for a center that, despite being equipped in the most homely way possible and having all the comforts, they had never imagined as a ideal scenario. Eva María remembers feeling “very bad” when she arrived at what has now become her home. “I insulted people, I threw a table, I hit an educator, a classmate… Now I’m pretty much over all of that,” he details. From a clinical point of view, Durán maintains that upon arrival, the new tenants “have many doubts about what it is to live here because they do not know what a mental health residence is. They arrive after a hospital admission that is usually traumatic,” he adds.
Go “from zero to 100” with the necessary support
José Luis Murillo is another of the residents whose life was completely changed by this resource. He had been living alone for many years after losing his closest relatives very suddenly. He spent a lot of time at home in which tobacco was his only company. His situation even made him try to take his own life. It was then that, after several hospital admissions, he arrived at the Grupo 5 residence in Cobeña, where he was practically reborn. “My life has changed radically, from zero to 100,” he says.
He also remembers his arrival at the center as a difficult moment. At the same table in the management office where two years later he tells us about his daily life, he sat next to his cousins and Susana García-Arias, director of this center, to formalize his entry. “They themselves come with many prejudices. There are those who come and tell me that people are going to be very crazy”, details the therapist. That is why it is vital to make them understand, both on the part of the professional team and those who will be their colleagues, what exactly the center is and why it is the best option for them. “The closeness, the personalization. The entire team knows that a person is coming when they arrive, and so do the rest of the residents. So everyone is already prepared to welcome them,” he explains.
These prejudices also often cloud the perception they have about themselves and their illness. “They have been made to understand all their lives that their identity is reduced to their pathology, that they are only sick, and that is not the case,” García-Arias emphasizes. “People with mental illness can live and develop in a community with support, and what we are trying to do here is precisely that, that their identity is not nullified by the illness and that they can regain control of their lives,” he maintains. “It is a very broad, very complex topic, but it is very important that in these centers we make the person feel visible, feel capable and can gradually make decisions about them,” highlights this occupational therapist.
Eva María, José Luis, and many other residents of these centers have found in this resource the support and tools they need to know themselves better, understand their own needs and promote their qualities and abilities without leaving aside other aspects of their life. life such as your family, your leisure or your hobbies. They also have the shelter and care of a specialized team with whom they have established a family bond and the rest of the people with whom they live and who are going through the same situation as them. They have found something as simple and at the same time as complex as the home they deserve and need to develop a full life.
