by Yana Buhrer Tavanier in Skopje, Demir Hisar, Demir Kapija, Negorci and Negotino
Time stands still in residential institutions for adults with intellectual disabilities and mental health problems in Macedonia where the lack of care, abuse, filth and neglect are all miserably present.
This is the outcome of a months long journalistic investigation, conducted mostly undercover in all institutions for adults with intellectual disabilities or mental illnesses in Macedonia.
It’s not just the striking lack of care, the human rights abuses, the inhuman and degrading treatment, the stench, the filth. One of the fundamental things an institution does to you is to rob you of your identity, to erase who you are, to deprive you of substance, to crush you and leave you a hollow shell, to take away your face and replace it with a mask, the same one worn by everyone around you. Even worse, institutions also make the concept of time cease to exist. A permanent hell. Humans, null and void.
(From Humans Null and Void)
See the photo galleries here and here.
See the similar investigation, conducted by the same author a year ago, covering Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia here.