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Respect International is an advocacy, humanitarian, and educational non-profit organization, created out of the need of persons with psychiatric challenges to be treated with respect, to experience hope, and to be provided with the basic needs to live.

The Absence of Respect
In some countries, conditions are so subhuman that nearly 40% of the patients confined to psychiatric hospitals die of malnutrition in the first year of hospitalization. Nearly 20% of patients die of hypothermia every winter because they do not have blankets or coats to stay warm. In other countries, the stigma toward persons with psychiatric challenges is so cruel that parents will abandon their child at the footsteps of a state psychiatric hospital. Once hospitalized, these children are confined in unlit basement cells. In the United States, persons with psychiatric challenges are made to feel like second class citizens. They routinely experience discrimination and many are forced to choose between substandard housing and homelessness.

Promoting Respect
Respect International collaborates with Corporations, Faith-based Organizations, Human Rights Organizations, Advocacy Groups, Professional Associations and Interested Individuals to improve the quality of life for persons with psychiatric challenges. For example, after receiving reports that the Kovashi State Psychiatric Hospital in St. Petersburg, Russia, operated for over two years without hot water, Respect International raised funds to purchase 13 new water boilers. Collaborating with two churches and the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry, a Netherlands-based mental health and international human rights organization, the water boilers were installed and the quality of life for nearly 400 patients was improved. Respect International organizes project teams that restore psychiatric facilities and community residences to a more humane standard; distributes blankets, mattresses, and warm clothing, to counter the fierce winters that patients in many developing nations endure; and, Respect International introduces a little joy into the lives of children and adolescents with psychiatric challenges by sponsoring holiday parties. In many countries there would be no parties and no gifts for the children without our sponsorship. Also, Respect International promotes respect through a variety of educational and consultation services. page five