Shackled Mental Patients

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5 April 2017, Surabaya,East Java,Indonesia: Ubaidilah a 44 year old mental illness sufferer is released from the chains he has been shackled to in a dingy room next to his family home in Badal Pandean village, East Java. Indonesian Social Affairs Dept. workers cut the bonds, cut his hair and nails and washed his emaciated body before putting him in a strait jacket and taking him to a facility in Malang for treatment. Ubaidilah is a patient in a program called "E- Shackling" which aims to free people suffering from mental illness, from the shackles that family often place them in to control them in the wake of a lack of treatment options and the program will treat them and enter them in a data base allowing them to be traced before releasing them back to their families. Some people stay chained to a stake or in rooms for years by their families and not all families are willing to take their sick family members back. Picture by Graham Crouch/The Australian