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Through a video broadcast on social networks, the actress Paulina Urrutia and her husband Augusto Gongora raised a citizen concern in the face of the plebiscite of October 25: the possibility that dementia patients can vote.
This is a sequence broadcast from the Gerociencia, Mental Health and Metabolism Center (GERO), in which Urrutia talks with Góngora about the constitutional process and the latter’s right to participate in the elections.
In the video, the former secretary of state of the Council of Culture asks the director: “Do you think you have the right to cast your vote?”. And Góngora responds: “Yes, why not? … I say yes, of course”. “And would you like to vote? Urrutia insists.” “To vote on that? But of course”, answers the former TV host, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
On October 25, the Chilean people will decide on our Constitution, however, some believe that people with dementia should not be part of the discussion. What is the opinion of these patients? Augusto tells us what he thinks about this topic. pic.twitter.com/EOcFfF2Bsf
– GERO (@gerochile) October 1, 2020
The post was released in the prelude to the meeting “Dialogue on the right to vote for people with dementia” last October 1. The instance was organized by the GERO, the Transdisciplinary Network on Aging of the University of Chile, the Society of Neurology, Psychiatry and Neurosurgery of Chile, the Memory and Neuropsychiatry Clinic and the Medical College of Santiago.
For Urrutia, it is a gesture that is directly related to memory. “The ritual of going in the morning, of being part of the queue, of talking, that cannot be taken away from a citizen of this country who built the democracy we have today like other people,” said the actress in the encounter, according to Qué Pasa magazine.
According to the same publication, in Chile there are around 200 thousand people diagnosed with some type of dementia. Article 16 of the current constitution weighs on them, where in paragraph 1 it is established that, among other reasons for suspending the right to vote, is the “Interdiction in case of dementia”.
According to lawyer Pablo Marshal, participant in the discussion, “the term dementia used by the constitution is nineteenth-century, it is not a technical term that we use today to identify cognitive impairment.”
According to researcher Andrea Slachevsky, deputy director of GERO, “(the vote) has a social value, it makes us citizens. So when we prohibit a person from voting because we determine that they do not have the skills, we are removing them from the public space ”.
“(The law) is discriminatory and also does not reflect what the decision-making capacity is like. It is not that from one day to the next the person ceases to have the ability to make decisions for everything, but rather that it is necessary to evaluate in a specific domain. If a person requires custody or tutelage to manage their assets, that caution be taken in that domain, but that this is not extended to everything, “added the academic, who proposes “Assisted vote”.
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