Butterflies (Chapter 2)


  • Photographer
    Scott Typaldos
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2012
  • Technical Info
    Digital

Before the Kosovo war 1998-1999 the Stime psychiatric institute was financed by the Serbian government and mostly inhabited by patients from Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia. After the change of power, the new Kosovo Albanian dominated government financially abandoned the place leaving the infrastructures in decay and the patients from minority ethnic groups without care. The patients who are for the most part severe psychotics are left roaming in the institution’s walls and garden with limited hygienic or medical care. The building’s inside walls and sanitary conditions are dilapidated. The staff is next to invisible, underpaid and undertrained, not willing or ready to cope with the very challenging job of caring for such extreme individuals. The place’s only psychiatrist shows up for a few hours each week in order to solve administrative problems, seldom meeting patients. The only fix constantly distributed are meals and cigarettes which patients regularly fight each other for. It can be argued that the institution, the caretakers, the politics behind the place’s management are generating or increasing the patients’ symptoms. Facing such an environment, I tried to confront illness in the least compromising manner and used the camera as a bridge in between the ever moving frontier separating sanity from insanity.

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