Crossing barriers - Going Back Home
Dagmar, Valdevino, Rui, João, José Pereira, Sônia, Marlene, Sebastiana, Cláudia, Grimalda, Conceição, Baiana, Domingos, Luís Miguel, Ioiô ... There are many therapeutic residents and recipients of the Going Back Home program whom we met and whose homes we visited.
Many are elderly, and carry, along with the mental illnesses, the issues related to age; they display the stigma of madness on their bodies - staggering walks, distorted faces, glassy glazes, rotten teeth. But it is under these conditions, and with their unique stories, that they share spacious homes, and put forward solutions to its dynamics. Slowly, they win the streets over and merge with the passers-by of the city with assured destinations: the bakery, clothing or shoe stores, a supermarket, a restaurant, literacy classes, hydrotherapy, work or their girlfriends/boyfriends houses.
All of them suffered from ill-treatment and had their human rights infringed along 30, 40 years of psychiatric confinement. Many of them still children; they completely lost touch with their relatives. With the truth that a true story depicts, they tell us about the cadavers that would come piled up and the macabre disincarnating ritual. The cadavers of their mates who died by the dozen after the suspicious “midnight tea”. A lot of them underwent electrocution sessions and were forced to bear them on their feet. Some were tied to their beds or handcuffed on the floors or walls. Some endured drowning sessions – treatment recommended and applied by the then called “health professionals” that managed and worked at the hospitals.
But that is not what they wished to tell us when they welcomed us into their homes in the beginning of March, 2007: they took us by the hand, and showed us around their bedrooms and living rooms decorated with paintings that they had made in handicraft classes, with small altars filled with saint imagery, with newly bought furniture and electric appliances. The psychosocial rehabilitation aid supplied by the Going Back Home program is received monthly into their own accounts, making the shopping possible.
They showed us their notebooks that recorded their first words in uncertain handwriting, they told us about the lunch they had prepared, talked about their walks and travels, and they showed us photos of these moments.
