Though it has high academic reputation, Hungarian psychiatry is facing serious problems caused mainly by the lack of professionals.The outgoing head of the Hungarian Psychiatric Association (Magyar Pszichiátriai Társaság), Tamás Kurinay named the lack of professionals the most serious problem. Fewer and fewer people choose to become psychiatrists and a lot of doctors and nurses decide to work abroad while in these days of economic crisis the number of those in need of help is continually growing.
Professor Frecska Ede, director of the Psychiatry Clinic in Debrecen says that the Hungarian psychiatry is not able to meet the demand of the patients that mental health care should be provided near the residence of the patients. There are not enough doctors to take care of the out-patients at the workstations in the vicinity of their homes.
Another problem is that there isn’t any monitoring system in Hungary that could estimate the number of those who need psychiatric care and a central programme for preserving or restoring mental health is also lacking even though, as Tamás Kurinay says, about half of those who commit suicide could be saved with the help of such a programme.
On 23 January, a foundation named Állampolgári Bizottság az Emberi Jogokért (CCHR) organized a talk about another problematic phenomena in the field of psychiatry: nowadays more and more human problems are pronounced to be mental disorders, which makes the psychiatric drug market a highly profitable industry.
