Prof. Agata Szulc: There is no going back from the road we entered

Prof. Agata Szulc, head of the Psychiatric Clinic of the Faculty of Health Sciences at WUM:

You can say that 2024 was a good year overall, if you look at the big picture. Many things that have worked well so far - are developing. We also have some novelties, such as the expansion of reimbursement for second-generation antipsychotics (until now we could only use them in patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, now we can also use them in patients with other psychoses, which is very important, because the use of first-generation drugs is actually already very rare).

The second issue - we are constantly thinking about reform, looking for solutions. Mental health centers are developing, and it is impossible to escape from this topic, because now we are at such a moment when the fate of their financing is at stake. I hope we will come to an agreement, because it would certainly be a shame to lose what we have achieved. The path we have embarked on, that is, moving away from inpatient treatment in psychiatry, is a path of no return and actually allows us to use different methods of treatment. Hospitals and psychiatric wards will become smaller and smaller. This does not mean that they will disappear, because they are also needed, for example, for the treatment of acute cases, or some patients with various social problems, and we still have a great number of such patients.

Psychiatric education is expanding. More and more attention is being paid to child and adolescent psychiatry, but we are also increasingly succeeding in expanding this education in general. This is important, because everything we see in the area of mental health is largely due to processes that have been going on for generations, traumas that have been passed from generation to generation. (...) Our mental health is very important for the development of future generations. Society is already slowly embracing this, and this is a very good thing.