CAPT Outreach magazine
September 1997
Editor's Column

Shocking portrait of a Greek asylum in 1982
makes us take pride in California's
institutional care for the mentally ill

By Keith Hearn
Editor

Many Psych Techs know what conditions were like 15 years ago in our state hospitals and other public and private facilities for the seriously mentally ill. The physical environment was good, and so were the treatment programs.

But in that same year, it was drastically different elsewhere in the world, and I thought you might be as interested as I was in one extreme situation.

I received an e-mail from a Florida Psych Tech who had visited CAPT's Internet website. She said a co-worker had moved from Greece a few years back and still corresponds with Greek friends on the net.

Her friends visited a national photography exhibition titled "The New Greek Photography, 1975-1995" held earlier this year at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Salonika.

They were horrified by photos taken inside the "State Infirmary" for the mentally ill on the island of Leros. She sent me the Web address for the photos, I checked them out and they were indeed shocking.

The photos here were taken in 1982. As you can see, they look more like 1752 or a concentration camp. Just compare that to our hospitals of that year. It's unbelievable.

The two photographers went together and took the photos the same day, Yiorgos Depollas shooting black-and-white, and Nikos Panayotopoulos using color.

You can see their photos by using the links below. When you get to each photographer's page, scroll down a few photos and you'll see the Leros asylum ones. For a bigger version, click on the little photo.

Yiorgos Depollas

http://www.culture.gr/2/22/227/22701/1120/e11.html

Nikos Panayotopoulos

http://www.culture.gr/2/22/227/22701/3140/e31.html

Commenting on the Leros asylum, the Greek museum's website talks about "the indescribable and chaotic horror of this foul establishment... a subject which clearly lay beyond anything resembling normal human experience."

Intrigued, I used web "search engines" to contact any Greek psychiatrists who might know if the situation on Leros had changed. Happily, I got several responses saying that those conditions no longer exist.

Dr. Sotoris Pastakis wrote me that in 1993 an English TV station and the International Herald Tribune did stories on Leros, thus creating "a European scandal."

As a result, he said "the Health Department of the European Community sent an international committee of experts and gave many millions for canceling this shame."

He said that during the 10 years between public release of the photographs and 1992, things remained the same. "You have to know that the asylum was working with only one or two psychiatrists for all the time since it was founded in the early 1960s," he said.

Another psychiatrist, Dr. Petros Skapinakis, told me "things changed a lot in Leros Asylum due to a European Union initiative and the multidisciplinary work of many mental health professionals from all over Europe."

I decided to write this column to remind California Psych Techs and other mental health workers that you should be proud of the work you do and the system in which you do it.

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