“It was a house for those who could not take care of themselves, for those who heard voices, who had strange thoughts and did strange things. The house was meant to keep them in. Once they came, they never left.”
― Madeleine Roux, Asylum
When we think of mental health institutions in the past, we’re filled with an anxiety-driven feeling of patients living in awful conditions while enduring humiliation and cruelty from the professionals tasked with caring for them. Advances in psychiatry and medicine have led to an improvement in how people are treated for mental and neurological conditions, yet we continue to be haunted by the fate of several who were not as lucky.
Photographer and documentarian Raymond Depardon is the author of the book Manicomio, which presents a photography series he carried out in the seventies while visiting several Italian sanatoriums, asylums, or facilities for mental health patients. His images capture the cruelty and abandonment these people faced on behalf of their loved ones who chose to leave them at the care of someone else.
When we think of these patients, we imagine someone with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or even body image issues. But the truth is that until even the decade of the seventies, people were committed for being gay or just for being different. Nowadays, medical professionals have discovered physiological conditions that were considered psychiatric. Such is the experience of Susannah Cahalan, explained in the book Brain on Fire, where an autoimmune disease was originally diagnosed as dementia or bipolar disorder.
“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”
Madeleine Roux, Asylum
During the time Depardon worked in Italy, he had the chance of meeting Franco Basaglia, the head of the Trieste asylum. Basaglia was one of the main names of the anti-psychiatric movement in the country. Their claim was against the deplorable conditions of mental health facilities of the time. Through his activism he was able to drive this intellectual and political fight that ended with some of these asylums closing in 1978.
Before this happened, Depardon documented the sad truth of the psychiatric facilities where dozens of men and women of all ages were abandoned. They’d remain there in dirty clothes, freezing rooms, and endure hostile treatment. This artist’s lens showed the brutality with which mental patients were subjugated to in places such as Trieste, Naples, Torino, San Servolo, and San Clemente.
Most of Depardon’s images remained in the dark for decades. A few years ago the French photographer put together a book to bring these issues to the public. This compendium of stories became a collection titled Manicomio which captures the essence of the dark days of Italian psychiatry.
But cruelty and abandonment are not exclusive to Italian asylums of the seventies. To this day there are several institutions that continue to torture and abuse of patients who have long been forgotten by their families. The photographer was able to demonstrate the hell people live with when they reach the point where the line between sane and insane becomes almost invisible, when they do not know if they’re there to get better or to wish they stopped existing altogether.
Translated by María Suárez