Public Story
the madness among us
In the beginning of the 20th century, the Brazilian State of Minas Gerais was the place with the largest concentration of psychiatric hospitals in the country. With time, some of these institutions were closed and slowly all the people were being taken to the psychiatric hospital in Barbacena. The place became a reference in the country because they accepted all the people that arrived there. About 70% of the people inside the hospital didn’t have a mental illness; the place was a house for all the stigmatized people. Around 60 thousand people were killed inside due to mistreatment and isolation.
Today, many of the hospital survivors live in therapeutic residences. These houses were built in 2001, after the reform of the law that established a new humanized protocol for the treatment of mental diseases. However, the years of incarceration still reflect on these people’s lives.
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