We give people their humanity back’: inside Croatia’s pioneering mental health centre
High walls still surround the oldest asylum in the Balkans, an 18th-century building pocked with the artillery scars of last century’s civil war, but the gates are no longer locked. Handles have been replaced on internal doors and bars removed from windows. “The jail,” said Darko Kovaoic, a 53-year-old poet with schizophrenia who lives here, “has broken open.” The institution in Osijek, eastern Croatia, is run by Ladislav Lamza, a former social worker who is taking on the government, the health minister, and his own staff to transform the lives of…
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