Mental Health Activist Virginia Gonzalez Torres
http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/may/mexico/index.html
One Woman's Crusade for the Mentally Ill
Only staff were allowed in this Ocaranza courtyard. Through the back gate was a
shadeless courtyard, where patients were left to sit naked in the midday sun.
May 27, 2002 -- In the 1960s, advocates for the mentally ill badgered
authorities into closing squalid psychiatric hospitals in the United States. But
they were less successful in getting community-based facilities for the mentally
ill opened. American cities ended up with the mentally ill living -- and
suffering -- on the streets.
Today in Mexico, there's a woman leading a similar revolution against large
psychiatric asylums, but she's taking it one step further. NPR's Joanne
Silberner reports for All Things Considered.
For 25 years, Virginia Gonzalez Torres has been facing down anyone who
neglects or abuses Mexico's mentally ill. Now a 53-year-old mother of four, she
began her crusade after her older sister was sent to a private psychiatric
hospital to be treated for manic depression.
Gonzalez, an heiress, grew up in a wealthy and politically connected family in
Mexico City. When her sister fell ill, Gonzalez was 22. At the time, the only
psychotic people she encountered were characters on movie screens; they
frightened her so much, she says, that she would run out of theater.
Swallowing her fears, Gonzalez visited her sister every day. As she grew more
comfortable with her sister and the other patients, her rebellious side came
out. Out of curiosity, she was soon making visits to public institutions.
Gonzalez was overwhelmed by what she found: the traumatized faces of patients,
their screams for help, the smell of neglect.
She started visiting other facilities, including the Fernando Ocaranza Mental
Hospital, about an hour north of Mexico City. Ocaranza is a turreted medieval
fortress that rises out of dusty fields. Until a year and a half ago, it was a
hellhole, virtually a prison, for seriously ill mental patients.
Gonzalez saw patients left naked in the midday sun, with nothing to do and no
access to a bathroom. Urine and feces where everywhere. Men and women were put
in small areas together. Patients no longer knew their names.
Gonzalez couldn't stand by. She starting confronting politicians, lodging
complaints, and when that didn't work, she scaled Ocaranza's walls with TV
reporters from the United States and Mexico.
Her efforts led to the closing of Ocaranza -- but that wasn't enough. Gonzalez
insisted that the money spent on Ocaranza be used on homes for the patients.
Those who were seriously ill would live on hospital grounds in new villas.
Others would live in group homes in regular neighborhoods, taking classes,
taking care of themselves and even earning money through crafts they made.
Mental health experts who know Gonzalez' work say she's taken treatment ideas
pioneered in richer countries like the United States, Italy and Spain and pushed
them beyond what anyone expected was possible.
Advocacy groups like Mental Disability Rights International say her two-step
advocacy -- closing hospitals and setting up halfway houses -- is setting an
international standard.
There's still much left to do, says Gonzalez. Thirty-one psychiatric hospitals
still warehouse thousands of mental patients in Mexico, and Gonzalez is getting
ready to go public with videos of the squalid conditions inside 15 of those
institutions.
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