Mental health plan, so a unified direction will allow the standardisation of services and the updating of responses to the new needs of citizens

At the end of 2025, the green light was given to the National Action Plan for Mental Health (Pansm). The Unified State-Regions Conference approved the text. Much has been said about mental health over the last few years, as a rising emergency affecting different groups of the population, including adolescents, with a growing need for care, an increased risk of suicide and an often inadequate service response; users of new substances of abuse, who are a factor in the increase of behavioural emergencies, emergency room admissions and psychopathology migrants, exposed to specific stress factors that require dedicated mental health pathways; offenders, in prisons and in psychiatric-forensic pathways, for whom it is necessary to guarantee care pathways that combine health and safety; the elderly, with particular reference to the frail, lonely and non-self-sufficient.

As the National Coordination of the Spdc (Psychiatric Diagnostic and Treatment Services), there are at least five novelties we wish to highlight from the Pansm. First of all, we are faced with a national project with a unitary planning will that opposes the fragmentation of the health service. The territorial and hospital services for mental health, in the face of competitive choices (with other disciplines, with the private sector and with the universities) in the individual territorial realities, have suffered a profound impoverishment over the last 25 years. A national vision succeeds in expressing more clearly a univocal planning intent that instead often ends up getting lost in localist visions.

We also point out the centrality of the Departments of Mental Health, even though there are many subjects that take care of patients suffering from mental pathologies (private bodies, foundations, associations, etc.), the governance of the demand and the overall management of the care response is re-proposed as essentially public. This guarantees a system capable of declining responses according to needs in an equitable and universalistic manner. Moreover, the Pansm contains a care response based on taking charge through the integration of services, between hospital and territory, but also between services dealing with psychiatry in adults and minors, addiction, psychological distress. It proposes a Department that is able to offer an adequate response according to needs and the continuation of care. It also includes the definition of care pathways for offenders with the intention, which is not easy, of guaranteeing care and safety (also of operators).

Last but certainly not least, the provision of three-year financial funding which, although still not fully satisfactory to cover all the shortcomings, accumulated over the past twenty years in which politics has 'forgotten' the needs of mental health, certainly has the merit of having brought the issue back to the centre of political debate.

From 15 to 17 January in Bergamo, the congress of the National Coordination Spdc will be held under the title 'Progettare il Futuro: Spdc aperti a una società in trasformazione' (Planning the Future: Spdc Open to a Changing Society). This will be an opportunity to better discuss the declination that the Pansm must have in the coming months. We will do so with Alberto Siracusano, who was in charge of coordinating the Ministerial Technical Table that produced the document and was recently appointed president of the Superior Health Council. Also participating in the debate will be Giuseppe Nicolò, deputy coordinator of the Technical Table, and the president of the Italian Society of Psychiatry, Guido Di Sciascio.