“If they are not mad when they go into these cursed Houses, they are soon made so by the barbarous usage they there suffer…Is it not enough to make anyone mad to be suddenly clapped up, stripped, whipped, ill fed, and worse used? To have no reason assigned for such treatment, no crime alleged, or accusers to confront?”
— Daniel Defoe English novelist,
writing about the conditions in asylums in the 1700s
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, social outcasts were labeled mentally ill, and if they were not tortured at the stake, they were imprisoned in the most squalid conditions. As authors Franz G. Alexander, M.D., and Sheldon T. Selesnick tell us, “Should they survive the filthy conditions, the abominable food, the isolation and darkness, and the brutality of their keepers, the patients of Bedlam [in England] were entitled to treatment,” including bloodletting and various “so-called harmless tortures.”
According to Dr. Jean Garrabe, president of the World Psychiatric Association International Jubilee Congress held in Paris in June 2000, “…conditions for helping the mentally ill have changed radically.” Dr. Garrabe could not be more wrong. Indisputable evidence attests that “Bedlam” is indeed alive and happening, and not just in England.
It has been left to CCHR and other human rights groups to investigate and expose such modern-day atrocities.
Italy’s Concentration Camp Asylums
In April 1991, accompanied by government officials and media, CCHR conducted a raid on a psychiatric facility in Italy. Patients were found naked, living like animals and locked in rooms with peeling walls, old stained tables and chairs. Beds were covered with human feces and urine. It was not an isolated incident.
Over the next five years, successive raids carried out on Italy’s forgotten asylums located thousands of patients housed in similar sordid conditions.
“The asylums that I saw are concentration camps… We cannot separate the tree from the fruit it produces and we have to judge the system by its fruits. What I have seen of psychiatry cannot bring me to any other conclusion… Together with all the good people of CCHR Italy, we did a good job…[we have] shown to the people…that such horrors exist and that we have to put an end to it,” observed Senator Edo Ronchi in 1994, after participating in one of the raids.
In 1996, a government resolution ordered 97 asylums closed and sold, the proceeds to be used to find alternative accommodations and humane care for the thousands of inmates. Stiff penalties for noncompliance were included.
Today these horrifically neglected people have been restored their dignity—relocated, taught to read and write, to work and care for themselves for the first time in their lives.
In 1996, during the 50th anniversary of the Italian Republic, the Mayor of Garbagnate presented CCHR with a medal for its humanitarian service to citizens.
Greece And Hungary: Shackled And Caged
In Athens, Greece, the Ntaou Pendeli psychiatric institution kept children in cold, barren wards with mentally handicapped adults, often lying naked in their own feces and urine. One child was found shackled to a bed by the ankle. Children witnessed horrors such as the rape of other children by psychiatric nurses. CCHR worked with a national television show to expose this, and in 1995, the offending psychiatric ward was shut down.
In Hungary, patients are confined in a cage-like bed as punishment for “misbehavior” such as getting up in the night or taking food from the refrigerator. Left to defecate in bed pans spilling over onto the sheets, patients suffered from bed sores and life-threatening infections.
Thanasis Legas, speaking at CCHR’s Human Rights Award event on behalf of Mikas Triatafylopoulos of Sky TV (who helped expose pyschiatric abuses in Greece) acknowledged CCHR’s work saying, “[We] congratulate [CCHR] on your touchingly, altruistic interest in the disabled of this planet…”
