10 Shocking Photos of Inhumanity in Indonesian Psychiatric Hospitals

Between 2011 and 2012, photojournalist Andrea Star Reese investigated pasung in Indonesia. This is the term for the arrest of people with some kind of mental illness, which should have been banned from the country in 1977. To this day, however, many citizens live in subhuman conditions in these sanatoriums, and Reese's photos warn that, It is still a taboo in the country.

1. Agus sings in his cell, where he lives permanently because of the guardians' fear that he will run away.

2. Evi started hallucinating at age 15, and her parents paid her to be chained to a wooden bed - something called the “Islamic approach” to treatment.

3. The Galuh Foundation is one of these pasungs, where men and women are separated only by a wire mesh.

4. Muhhammad is a kind of healer who uses herbs and chants to bring patients into hypnotic states.

5. Anne spent 10 years locked in a windowless room, and her father says she doesn't need much food

6. Many patients spend years in solitary cells

7. Seapudin's leg muscles atrophy from lack of use

8. Food, clothing, exercise and social interaction are lacking in these “human deposits”

9. Each patient's space is restricted, and the room also serves as a guest toilet.

10. Chains and padlocks are common, even at Wediodining Lawang Psychiatric Hospital, considered the best in Indonesia and one of the few to have a ward for the elderly.

For more work by the photographer, you can follow her on Instagram or Facebook, and visit her site.

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