Paradise/Internat

According to the official statistics of year 2013, there are over 1300 mental houses for adults, called INTERNAT in Russia, and over 200 houses for children and over 150.000 people live there.

According to the official statistics of year 2013, there are over 1300 mental houses for adults, called INTERNAT in Russia, and over 200 houses for children and over 150.000 people live there. Psycho-neurological boarding in Russia is a permanent residence for people with mental disabilities. It means that they spend 15-20 years and more there.

There is no official statistics on how many of the mental houses are only meant for women or only for men. But it is known that most of these houses are situated in rural areas.

Estimated over 50 000 patients of asylums come from orphanages for mentally disabled children. After reaching the age of 18 they must have a psychiatric re-examination and if the conclusion is that the examinee is able to provide for themselves, they have to be let free and be provided with accommodation from the government; but in reality the re‐examination is absent. The intellectual disability of persons who arrived from orphanage for mentally disabled children is in fact often associated with educational neglect, the lack of proper training and education and the lack of rehabilitation programs. This is very close to phenomenon called over-diagnosing that appeared in Soviet psychiatry and was widely spread. About 70 percents patients of asylums are just persons with reduced intelligence though many of them are able to live independently provided they get regular social assistance.

Limited interior space , overcrowding, forced labor, lack of loving relationship due to the sexual segregation of the institutions and the prohibition of expression of patients sexuality is a small list of how to describe the life in an asylum, which is really difficult to express in a visual story just as a lot of other “hidden” problem.