'Living in hell': mentally ill people in Indonesia chained and confined

**WARNING GRAPHIC PICTURE AND GRAPHIC PICTURES ON LINKS**

Almost 40 years after Indonesia banned the practice of shackling people with mental health conditions, nearly 19,000 are still living in chains, or are locked up in institutions where they are vulnerable to abuse, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW).



The study says that although pasung – shackling or confining people with psychosocial disabilities – was banned in 1977, enduring stigma and a chronic lack of mental health care and community support services mean its use remains widespread.

People subjected to pasung can have their ankles bound with chains or wooden stocks for hours, days, months or even years. They are often kept outside, naked and unable to wash.

Recent figures from the Indonesian government suggest that more than 57,000 people in Indonesia have endured pasung at least once, while an estimated 18,800 are currently chained or locked up.

In 2014, 1,274 cases of pasung were reported across 21 provinces and people were rescued in 93% of cases. There is, however, no data on how many of those were successfully rehabilitated and how many were later returned to their shackles.

HRW researchers spoke to one man who kept his daughter shackled for 15 years because he feared she had been bewitched and didn’t have the money to take her to a doctor.

“She became destructive, dug up other people’s crops and ate raw corn from the plant. I was ashamed and scared she’d do it again,” he said.

“First I tied her wrist and ankles together with cables but she managed to untie herself so I decided to lock her up because the neighbours were scared.”

Although he released his daughter two months after the visit from HRW, he told the group that, for a decade and a half, she had been left to defecate in her room, which was never cleaned. She was not bathed in all that time, and was neither clothed nor visited. Her only contact with the outside world, beyond the meals pushed twice daily through a hole in the wall, came when local children pelted her with stones.

“Shackling people with mental health conditions is illegal in Indonesia, yet it remains a widespread and brutal practice,” said Kriti Sharma, disability rights researcher at Human Rights Watch and the author of the report.
“People spend years locked up in chains, wooden stocks, or goat sheds because families don’t know what else to do and the government doesn’t do a good job of offering humane alternatives.”

The report recognises that the government has taken action to address the practice through initiatives such as the “Indonesia free from pasung” programme, which aims to eradicate the practice by 2019. But it says progress is being stymied by the decentralised nature of the governmental system and by inadequate resources and infrastructure.

The study says that Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago country of 250 million people, has only about 800 psychiatrists and 48 mental hospitals, more than half of which are in just four of its 34 provinces.

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/mar/21/living-in-hell-indonesia-mentally-ill-people-chained-confined-human-rights-watch-report?CMP=fb_gu


Absolutely horrific!
My grandparents lived in Indonesia for a while and always had the highest of praise for its people. They loved it.

I cannot understand how this is being allowed to happen? It's terrible.

Some quotes:

"agus sings in his cage. Keepers won’t let him out fearing he would run away, so this cage has become his permanent home”

"Evi's hallucinations started when she was fifteen. Her parents paid for the wooden bed and Islamic approach to her treatment”

“Muhammad (left) is performing a mass healing. For the whole day and night the patients will drink herbal drinks, pray, vomit and eventually enter hypnotic trance”

More in this thread but be warnedV there are some horrible pictures:

http://www.boredpanda.com/mental-ilness-disorder-indonesia-andrea-star-reese/

Its is disgusting Eddie on every single level and you will see little done by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Espcially as it has representatives of nations who abuse human rights, that make up the council. Can you believe the likes of Saudi, had a representative that headed up this council?
It as a I say funded and politically supported by Gulf state money. Hence why Muslim majority nations have little resolutions creted by the UN for Muslim majority Human rights abusers


To prove this bias and how it is corruped, all you need to see is where their efforts are concentrated

It's diabolical and I don't see how it can go on.
Who is the voice for these people???

How backward a country do you have to be to think this way??

Well, there is another reason as to why sadly

If you have time, please read:



Religious Attitudes toward the Disabled (2015)

Michael Moore

At first glance Islam's approach to the disabled appears benign. For example, on the Why Islam? website Saulat Pervez describes two cases where the prophet Muhammad behaved decently toward disabled persons, adding that "These examples are important because they show that even though the Prophet, pbuh, was sensitive to their particular circumstances, he did not consider these to be things which should stand in their way of leading normal lives" (Pervez, 2014). But a closer look reveals a different attitude, one that reinforces an association between physical disabilities and disbelief in the dogma. Such a mindset is more than sufficient to provide scriptural justification for those who choose to disparage the disabled:

"Those who reject our Signs are deaf and dumb, - in the midst of darkness profound: whom Allah willeth, He leaveth to wander: whom He willeth, He placeth on the way that is straight" (Koran 6:39).

"But whosoever turns away from My Message, verily for him is a life narrowed down, and We shall raise him up blind on the Day of Judgment" (Koran 20:124).

"Such are the men whom Allah has cursed for He has made them deaf and blinded their sight" (Koran 47:23).

While these verses may well have used deafness and blindness symbolically, they nonetheless ridicule those who suffer these adversities. The results speak for themselves: "Outside the Circle," a report by child rights organization Plan International and the University of Toronto, describes

the horrific scale of discrimination and abuse faced by children with disabilities in West Africa [which is 70% Islamic]. This includes shocking reports of infanticide and trading in body parts of children with disabilities.... [C]hildren with disabilities are subject to profound levels of poverty, exclusion and discrimination in a region marked by deprivation and harmful practices rooted in traditional beliefs (Kumar, 2013).

Amar Alam notes the "unprecedented levels of prejudice and discrimination" mentally disabled individuals suffer at the hand of Muslims, attributing this attitude to the "prevalent belief among Muslims ... that intellectual disabilities are caused by mental illness, possession by Jinns, supernatural phenomena and punishment for previous sins" (Alam, 2014). Similarly, Ayse Ciftci, Nev Jones, and Patrick W. Corrigan (2012) surveyed the literature on the stigma of mental health in Muslim communities and found that in addition to discrimination and ostracism, mentally disabled Muslims also suffer from lack of professional treatment due to their families' unwillingness to report their condition.

Muslim apologists differ little from the apologists of other religions when it comes to defending contemptuous attitudes toward the disabled. Shaykh Abd al-Rahmaan al-Barraak, a Saudi scholar who recently issued a fatwa sanctioning the killing of advocates of gender mixing at work and in education, wrote an essay on why Allah created mental disabled people, a question that he answers as follows: "His perfect wisdom decrees that He creates opposites.... He created His slaves with differences in their bodies and minds, and in their strengths. He has made some rich and some poor, some healthy and some sickly, some wise and some foolish. By His wisdom, He tests them, and He tests some by means of others, to show who will be grateful and who will be ungrateful" (al-Barraak, n.d.).

Scott Thompson takes a different line: "If a person suffers from a physical handicap or disability, he has some special talent to compensate for it, whether he is aware of that talent or not. For this reason, disabilities are regarded as tests from God, designed to allow the disabled person to show his character and his own unique gifts" (Thompson, n.d.).[6] Wasif Islam offers a similar justification: "[B]eing disabled is a test from Allah in this life, and therefore can be a blessing in disguise. Every disabled person should be patient and live up to this challenge. Allah promised those who observe patience a great reward in the Hereafter" (Islam, 2009).

And if none of these justifications work, one can always fall back on this old chestnut from a fatwa issued by al-Barraak:
People are incapable of comprehending Allaah's wisdom. He cannot be questioned as to what He does, while they will be questioned. Glorified and exalted be He. Whatever you understand of His wisdom, believe in it, and whatever you cannot understand, say, 'Allaah knows best and is most wise, and we know nothing except that which You have taught us, and He is the All-Knowing, Most Wise.' (al-Barraak, n.d.)

I have shown that the followers of the above-mentioned religions can find in their sacred texts ample grounds for looking down upon the disabled, for excluding them both socially and physically, and for endorsing the pernicious idea of blaming the victim. In an edited volume dealing with the three monotheistic religions' approach to disability, Darla Schumm and Michael J. Stoltzfus reached a similar conclusion:

While religious attitudes and responses to disability are quite diverse, it is not uncommon for Jewish, Christian, and Islamic perspectives to mimic the medical model by connecting disabling bodily conditions with individual spiritual deficiency. There is a persistent tendency to associate disability with individual sin. Well-meaning people from multiple religious traditions often struggle to offer religious explanations and religious solutions to the "problem" (Schumm & Stoltzfus, 2011, p. xiv).

http://infidels.org/library/modern/michael_moore/disabled.html


Just some of the article posted Eddie, more to read

Religious reasons????

eddie wrote:Religious reasons????

AND GREATLY EXACERBATED by the size of their economy...

INDONESIA has a population of over 220 million people, and their GNP last year was $US 960 billion...

DOESN'T matter really how much the sophists among us like eddie and Dodge wring their hands, cry their Western society crocodile tears, and attempt to claim the moral high ground, there will always be a few salient facts that they will always choose to ignore : 

OVER 80% of Indonesia's citizens live in virtual poverty, (though, this also means that their "middle class" is still bigger than the total population of Oz, NZ, and our Islander nations combined..);
Indonesia's GDP/head is less than 10% of that in Australia; 
MANY South East Asian countries --  including Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Philippines -- don't have a universal or effective 'Social Welfare' system;
LET ALONE not having the kind of medical services that most Westerners would expect as a minimum --  Indonesia also doesn't even have a properly trained and qualified Ambulance service to transport casualties to and between their hospitals.

religious is a very minor part
lack of education, corruption and poverty are greater players, and like rural india there is still a lot of superstition.

PLUS there is the whole Indonesia is not really United
there is essentially 2 other ‘governments’ and constant civil War since 60’s/70’s between
The 3 major divisions are;
Javanese (official gov't)


Aceh (rebels, more Islamic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Aceh_Movement


West Papuan & Papuan (indigenous rebels related to Papua New Guineans) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_conflict
 
In addition to that there are dozens of smaller groups like the Balinese that are generally peaceful