Many admission forms remain incomplete with regard to rights and the means of exercising them. In addition, in general hospitals that have psychiatric units, the reception documents are sometimes identical for the somatic and psychiatric departments respectively. The director general for the organisation of treatment at the ministry of health is asked to distribute a circular giving the minimum information that has to be included in the documents (addresses of competent courts) and the material means which have to be at patients’ disposal in order to enable their implementation. However, whatever their condition, as the law states 172, patients have rights, which it lists, in particular the right to contact the authorities, a doctor, a lawyer and to be informed of rules and regulations etc. Treatment services and units should take measures to ensure the effective implementation of these rules. Patients have a right to respect of their private lives, to confidentiality of treatment and to the required discretion with regard to their presence in a psychiatric treatment unit. These aspects are often neglected. For example, telephone switchboard operators should be informed of the presence of particular individuals in one of the departments of an institution. Telephone calls to persons outside the hospital can be listened to by anybody in the vast majority of cases. Personal cupboards with a lock in the rooms173 are still too rare, as are real telephone booths and letter boxes. It should be possible to identify the harshest measures of restraint with regard both to the person who imposes and brings them to an end, and with regard to their duration and frequency. In the institutions on which reports were issued in 2012, too few of these measures are subject to written reports in ad hoc registers (which may be very simple). On this point, as on others, a general incentive measure is earnestly awaited. The passing on of medical records is done according to deadlines (and sometimes procedures) which vary from one institution to the next. Since the conditions of access of patients to their records have been defined by law for the past ten years, it would be desirable to make sure that in certain cases such requests are made “commonplace”, with the precautions provided for by the texts. It would not be unuseful to record the number of applications of this kind, something which is not always done, and the actions taken in response to them. Family relations may be limited due to patients’ state of health. However, when this is not the case, provision should be made for appropriate visiting conditions, both with regard to the material setting and the dimensions of the place provided for visits: in one institution inspected, two families could not simultaneously take their places in the visiting lounge and one of them therefore had to converse in totally makeshift conditions. Treatment concerns should n ot obscure patients’ other rights. The right to the respect of relations with family and friends is, it must be recalled, a fundamental human right. The volume of activities made available varies between institutions. However, it is henceforth everywhere constrained by reduced budgets. Many contracts for specialised therapists (art therapy, occupational therapy etc.) are threatened or disappearing. Since “adjustment” of the workforce 174 – as already alluded to in this section – has already very considerably restricted the possibilities of accompanied outings for patients, boredom is increasing in psychiatric institutions, while, at the same time, the average length of stays is increasing. In the course of inspecting one unit, the inspectors discovered that the only existing activities were organised in the corner of a corridor. 172 Same article. And, of course, subject to – discreet – checks on the part of the staff. 174 As it is elegantly referred to today, i.e. “downsizing”. 173 75