The lawyer spoke about the protection of children in families with psychiatric patients

A citizen who is dangerous to a child due to a mental disorder may be restricted by a court in parental rights at the request of the guardianship and guardianship authorities or the second parent, but there are also cases when children are taken away from such families altogether, Pavel Kantor, a lawyer with the legal group of the regional charitable public organization Center for Curative Pedagogy, told Izvestia..

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Commenting on the situation with the man who threw his three-year-old daughter out of the window in Ufa, Pavel Kantor noted that a citizen with a mental disorder may be limited in parental rights by the court.

"However, it should be understood that if parents live together with each other and their children, then restricting one parent's rights does not make sense, since he is not limited in communication with the child anyway. In our practice, there have been cases when guardianship authorities removed children from families where one parent suffered from a dangerous mental disorder, and the other could not or did not want to protect the child," he told Izvestia.

Pavel Kantor nevertheless warned against the "demonization" of people with a mental disorder. According to him, it is often the preservation of the family environment that has a beneficial effect on mental disorder. Moreover, many people with mental disorders are quite responsible parents.

"Although, of course, the presence of a mental disorder in one of the parents requires increased attention and responsibility from the psychiatrist conducting the dispensary, family members, and guardianship authorities," he stressed.

Marina Kalyuzhnaya, a psychiatrist and narcologist at the Dr. Kalyuzhnaya Clinic, notes that often the monitoring system for families in which one of the parents has a mental disorder fails: "between visits to the doctor, the condition may worsen, and relatives or caregivers do not always adequately assess the risk or promptly receive information."

Read more about the incident in Ufa and how people with psychiatric illnesses are monitored in the Izvestia article:

Window drama: a man with a psychiatric illness threw his daughter from the fourth floor

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