[The crisis in psychiatry and the protection of the civil rights of mentally ill patients].

In Poland a basic opinion of the mental health care system is that it considers that mental disorders are illnesses and that an ill person is weaker (worse) and less useful in the social distribution of roles and tasks. Consequently, the ill are excluded from the main-stream of social life: they are deprived of jobs by an easy and early recognition of disability, and the granting of disability pensions, by civil law prohibition of marriage, criminal law ban on sexual contacts etc. A person has little chance for a just life if he/she is deprived of the possibility of working, founding a family, if he/she receives an inadequate pension, remains sexually isolated and on the margin of public life. This medical model of care includes a lot of discriminatory features in the area of human and civil rights of the mentally ill. The discussion concentrated on selected features of the crisis in world psychiatry as well as the practical, ideological, clinical, institutional and organizational difficulties of Polish psychiatry. The main goal of this paper is the raising of psychiatry's awareness of its faults, in order to induce the creation of a new system of mental health care, free of the discriminatory stigmas of the ill and more adequately adapted the ideas of a contemporary democratic state.