Children experiencing mental health crises in Cyprus are being driven between cities by patrol car to get the care they need. In many cases, it later emerges that they actually require different services altogether.
Adult patients with mental health conditions are also taken to Athalassa Hospital by patrol car, sometimes in handcuffs, and end up spending the night in police station cells.
Cyprus spends just three per cent of its budget on care for people with mental illness, compared with an EU average of six per cent, the lowest rate in the bloc. A new mental health hospital is being planned, yet only four mental health nurses are currently available to staff the sector.
MPs on the parliamentary Health Committee heard the same findings repeated, without solutions, across the last three sessions. This week, the committee called on all relevant ministries and state services, along with the State Health Services Organisation (SHSO), to push for a change in the law and to move ahead with solutions serving Cypriot patients.
Patrol car from Paphos to Nicosia
Savia Orfanidou, chair of the Health Committee, referred to a complaint from the family of a child at the extreme end of the autism spectrum. She said an order had been issued for a child who was self-harming, and it was decided the child needed to be moved from Paphos to Nicosia by patrol car. The child was later returned to Paphos, again by police vehicle.
A representative of the department responsible said the case was eventually assessed as “purely social,” and that social services and mental health services in Paphos were then brought in. She stressed that mental illness needs to be kept separate from social protection needs, so that cases that are primarily social are not “psychiatrised.”
Need for a change in the law
An unnamed representative of a family association for people with mental illness told the committee that unless the law changes, patients and their families will continue to suffer, be humiliated, stigmatised and psychologically traumatised. She said the association had raised the same concerns in October last year and repeated them since. Families should not have to seek a compulsory hospitalisation order, she said, a process that draws in patrol cars, police cells and judges. In effect, she said, families are asked to have their own sick relative arrested just to get them to hospital. “These things must stop happening,” she said.
She added that the association had asked for family support to be written into the National Mental Health Strategy, and said she had lived with the situation personally since the age of 15, without anyone giving her the guidance she needed.
Nikos Loizides, chairman of the police branch of the “Isotita” (“Equality”) union, said officers were sent to patients’ homes, where they sometimes broke down doors and had to calm down relatives before restraining patients and taking them away. “We handcuff them, throw them in the van and the cell,” he said, calling for the law to change.
He said he was ashamed that half the force’s patrol cars carried bloodstains from injuries sustained by people hurt outside Athalassa Hospital, adding that some officers ended up standing in for psychiatrists and psychologists, trying to calm patients down.
Overcrowded wards, too few new nurses
Representatives of the mental health nurses’ unions described conditions in the hospital’s three wards before the first phase of renovation was completed, saying the wards, with a combined capacity of about 60 beds, had ended up housing far more patients than that.
They also stressed the need to strengthen the mental health nursing specialty, pointing out that only four nurses are currently available. According to figures they presented, just 36 new nurses registered with the Mental Health Nurses Registry between 2020 and 2026, and they warned that without real incentives to attract new professionals, the specialty would “die out.”
SHSO: ‘We recognise the problem’
A representative of the State Health Services Organisation (SHSO) said the organisation recognised the system’s serious shortcomings and accepted its share of responsibility for addressing them.
Roberto Karachannas, the organisation’s financial director, said several patients needed specific medication, but sometimes stopped taking it. Current legislation does not allow medication to be made compulsory, he said, so some patients relapse and end up back in hospital. He rejected the suggestion that services were completely absent.
On the second and third phases of the Mental Health Hospital’s upgrade, he said the assessment was at an advanced stage and had produced a positive outcome. Any funding required within 2026 would need to be included in a supplementary budget, he said, while money needed for 2027 would be included in next year’s state budget.
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