Author: Andy Eric Castillo Patton
Mental Health Plans of the Autonomous Communities are the main framework upon which suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention in Spain is structured. This framework responds to a decentralised health policy (article 148.21 of the 1978 Spanish Constitution), on which most of the specific strategies or protocols are developed.
Within this defining framework, the design of these policies has been evaluated in accordance with a selection of recommendations suggested by the World Health Organisation. This analysis, based on a deliberative and comparative approach, finds that the current degree of correspondence of these measures with WHO criteria is extremely uneven (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Degree of correspondence of the regional measures on suicide with the WHO recommendations.
These results show remarkable differences between autonomous regions (see Figure 2), plus relevant shortcomings in the formal design of these policies, such as an excessively hospital-centric approach and an excessive lack of budgetary commitment.
Figure 2. Differences between autonomies
Therefore, there is a significant lack of precision in the identification of both national (there is currently no national suicide prevention plan or law) and international benchmarks in the design of universal, selective and indicated measures. However, the Covid-19 crisis has led to a formal improvement in several Autonomous Regions.
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