City alarmed over psychotic vagrants

Cebu City government expressed alarm over the continued presence of psychotic vagrants roaming the city streets.

Councilor Edgardo Labella is asking the Department of Health to institute an appropriate and humane approach by providing assistance for the permanent housing of psychotic vagrants.

"It cannot be denied that the sorry plight of the mental patients needs to be addressed by the concerned government agencies considering that the bustling open streets appear to be not the proper environment for their healing," Labella said in his proposed resolution.

Labella said that these psychotic vagrants roaming the streets seem to infer that the mentally-ill patients have been left out by the concerned government agencies.

"Letting mentally-disturbed individuals freely move in the city might wittingly or unwittingly elicit the impression that the city government has turned a blind eye into this socially important issue," Labella added.

Labella said that these psychotic vagrants pose threats to the people, and most of them are not even from Cebu City

In Cebu City, the cases of vagrant psychotics are referred to the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center, the only hospital in the province with a psychiatric ward. The city provides VSMMC with medicine for psychotic patients.

Councilor Gerardo Carillo, council committee on social services, was tasked by the city to coordinate with the psychiatry department of the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center so the hospital can assess the population of psychotic vagrants in the city, and the services it can provide to these individuals.

"This committee firmly believes that the city should actively participate, initiate even, in the care and hospitalization of these unfortunate brethren of ours," Carillo said, adding that the right approach is crucial in providing a sensible solution to the concern.

The city also asked VSMMC to expand the psychiatric ward for psychotic vagrants.

Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center Psychiatry Department chief Renato Obra recently asked the city to help in the decongestion of VSMMC's mental ward considering that it was built for 50 patients, but is actually serving more than a hundred. - Garry B. Lao