Condemned - Mental Health in African Countries in Crisis
Robin Hammond
NOOR
Wars, famines and natural disasters leave not only the dead to be buried but also survivors to go on living. While many come through crises with their bodies intact, the same cannot always be said of their minds.
Over the last fifty years, sub-Saharan Africa has seen more of these crises than any other region in the world. Their legacy is mental illness on a grand scale and few resources to treat it. Conflicts and disasters divert funds away from health and education. For the mentally disabled, hospitals can become prisons and ignorance can result in stigma and neglect. Care often involves forcible restraint in both institutions and homes.
The mentally ill are often accused of being possessed, or branded as witches. Spiritual healers are regularly called on to “deliver” them. Chained and sometimes starved to avoid “feeding the demon inside,” they are truly cursed, not by God but by their communities, by society.
There is arguably no group more neglected or vulnerable than the mentally ill and mentally disabled in African countries suffering from or recovering from disaster.
Preview
For this self-funded project, Robin Hammond traveled to the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo to document the mental scarring of those grieving for the millions killed and the psychological impact on hundreds of thousands of survivors of sexual violence. He documented the legacy of civil war in Sudan, photographing the mentally ill and mentally disabled locked away in Juba Central Prison.
To record the effects of displacement and malnutrition on the mind, he stayed in Dadaab, the world’s biggest refugee camp, where Somalis fleeing conflict and famine have sought safety. Hammond took photographs in bombed out streets and refugee camps in Somalia where, according to the World Health Organization, after twenty years of war, one in three citizens suffer from severe mental illness.
He went to Uganda where unspeakable violence at the hands of the Lord’s Resistance Army has caused deep psychological problems and left tens of thousands of children traumatized after killing as child soldiers.
He discovered people abandoned by their governments, the aid community, and society at large: a voiceless minority relegated to dark forgotten corners in churches, chained to rusty hospital beds, spending their lives behind bars in filthy prisons - lives condemned to misery.
