Basic psychologists, focus on young people and funding for clinics and staff: the mini-revolution for mental health begins

Prevention and maximum focus on young people, battered by the mix of malaise and old and new addictions, including smartphones and online gaming. Targeted training in universities and research to be strengthened. Personnel to be fully enrolled, starting with family doctors, precious repositories of patients' histories, up to new entries such as the primary care psychologist. Integrated care spread over all social and health care levels, including the grey areas of prisons and Rems, the residences for psychiatric offenders. Italy turns the spotlight back on mental health with the new 2025-2030 Plan launched in the Unified Conference after months of stalemate imposed by the Regions, determined to assert their autonomy on the organisation of care.

And to ask for funds, which in an asphyxiated landscape are beginning to arrive: the new budget law allocates to the implementation of the Plan - from the increase in the national health fund - 255 million in the three-year period 2026-2028 and 30 million a year from 2029. With a focus on the prevention of hardship, to which 30% of the funds will go, and on personnel, which is currently severely lacking and therefore 'cashes in' for permanent hirings of 30 million a year. Resources that will make it possible to "concretely mark a change of pace" and to put "mental health back at the centre of the political agenda", Health Minister Orazio Schillaci promised after the go-ahead for the Plan, which comes 13 years after the previous one.
"A document - comments Guido Di Sciascio, president of the Italian Psychiatry Society - that offers a unitary and modern vision of assistance and that can help make up for historical delays, provided that implementation is consistent and homogeneous throughout the country".

What is certain is that the picture of emergency in the country calls for massive interventions: so far psychiatry has been allocated just 3% of the total resources for public health, amounting to just over 3.5 billion, while, according to insiders, at least 2 billion more would be needed just for adult patients and a 30% increase in personnel, amounting to about 7,500 operators. In the meantime, the demand for care is growing: according to the latest mental health report, users of specialist services between 2022 and 2023 increased by 10% to more than 854,000, with the highest concentration in the 45-64 age bracket, while of the 9.6 million services routed by territorial services, just 8.4% are at home.

Yet it is precisely on primary care that one of the first bets of the Plan is being placed, which in less than one hundred pages aims to relaunch care and assistance: it is there that the integration of interventions entrusted to multi-professional teams is to be achieved. Among the novelties is the debut of the primary care psychologist, placed in the community houses, i.e. the multi-specialist outpatient clinics envisaged in implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, where citizens should find answers to both clinical and social-health problems. In the community houses, but also in the districts and in the advice centres, the new Mental Health Plan provides for the psychologist to intervene to 'intercept at an early stage situations of distress that, if not adequately managed, may evolve into psychic symptoms or chronic states'.

'A long-awaited and necessary choice,' says the president of the psychologists (Cnop) Maria Antonietta Gulino, 'which recognises the value of psychology in the prevention and early treatment of distress. The stable inclusion of psychology in primary care is a step forward for civilisation, because it brings citizens closer to the services and strengthens integration between health professionals'.