Rotting away: Pasung victim Gede Budayasa was once an athlete. He is now crippled after a decade in stocks or pasung.For most of the past decade, 34-year-old Gede Budayasa of Buleleng in Bali’s northeast has been nailed into a 2-meter-long wooden stock (pasung) by his right leg. He can move just a few inches to the left or right, evacuating his bowels where he sits on wooden planks day after day, year after year.
As a teenager Gede was an athlete, today his right leg muscles are so severely atrophied he can no longer walk and his right foot has become deformed due to his physical position.
Imagine sitting in an airplane for a decade and you begin to have a hint of the pain Gede must suffer due to this criminal restraint.
His companion is the pig in a pen across the path from his bamboo shelter. In a bizarre contrast, the pig is fat and free to move about, Gede is malnourished and permanently restrained. This reality is like stepping inside Dante’s Inferno.
Until last week Gede had no books, no magazines, no pencils and paper, nothing to pass his time until an Australian journalist and this writer purchased these and a radio, to give him some form of escape until his release can be achieved.
Gede’s family placed him in pasung when he was around 24 years of age; Gede had shown signs of aggression following the murder of his older brother, “the hero of our family”, and his family grew frightened of him.
They are desperately poor and have little or no understanding of mental disease and its treatability, explain volunteers from the Suryani Institute for Mental Health.
Malnourished like their son Gede’s parents, mother Jro Sedaan and father Putu Sari, are believed to be in their 70s. Also making up the family is a sister in her 40s, cousins, nieces and nephews — all younger family members appear very well fed.
The family says they have spent much of their savings on traditional Balinese healers, without success. A stint in Bali’s Rumah Sakit Jiwa Bangli (RSJ hospital for mentally ill) in 2006 and early 2007 proved successful, however believing himself cured of schizophrenia, Gede stopped taking medication.
While the family says Gede is fed daily, he is rarely spoken to; Gede’s sister makes the 30-meter stroll from her home to visit Gede each week and “we visit him on holy days, like Kuningan,” explains his niece who was 14 years of age when Gede was restrained — she has grown up with her uncle in stocks and has accepted his criminal abuse as just the way things are.
This acceptance of pasung as a tool in the management of the mentally ill lies at the dark heart of Gede’s tragedy; The Jakarta Post visited Gede with volunteer staff from the Suryani Institute for Mental Health, which has certainly achieved some outstanding results for others in Gede’s position, however family objections to having Gede released and sent to hospital for treatment has hamstrung the NGO for the past four years.
“We found Gede in 2007 and have been treating him since then. He was freed from pasung in 2009, but the family refused to continue his treatment. They went back to traditional healers,” says one volunteer.
His freedom lasted just a few months, Gede’s family preferring to discontinue medical treatment and revert to traditional healing and the violent practice of pasung.
This highlights the control given to families over the fates of mentally ill, a control allowed them by agencies such as the Suryani Institute and RSJ.
“We have tried many times to get him freed, but the family refuse. This is a very difficult situation,” said the Suryani Institute volunteer.
Both the Suryani Institute and director of RSJ, Made Sugiharta Yasa, say it is crucial to develop understanding among families about mental illness so that when their mentally ill relatives return from hospital, or are treated at home, they are not returned to pasung and continue taking their medication.
“We ask permission from the family to open the pasung and take the patient to hospital. The danger is when the family refuses and we take the patient out of pasung against their wishes, if an accident or any thing happened — the hospital would be blamed and that can cause problems, so we discuss the situation with the whole community that the person is safe with medication. If the family still refuses to release the person from pasung we begin treatment while the patient is in pasung until the victim is better and the family see it is ok and safe to release the victim,” says Made of the difficulty facing all mental health organizations. The Suryani Institute also begins treatment of patients while in pasung.
But the case of Gede Budayasa proves this method of depending on family approval is not fail proof. Despite four years of treatment under the Suryani Institute, with some months during that period free from pasung, Gede is again locked down next to the pig pen.
Calls to the RSJ from this writer had alarm bells ringing and the hospital sent a staff doctor to Gede’s home last week, however he was diagnosed with a neurological problem, not schizophrenia, and Gede’s family again refused to have him released to a hospital for treatment. Police acting on a report from this writer visited the family last Monday, again without the successful release of Gede.
This young man joins the estimated 10,000 to 26,000 people in pasung, chains or cages across Indonesia. These are the mentally ill people who are dropped into the giddyingly deep chasms in Indonesia’s mental health service.
Father and son: Putu (right), Gede’s father, wants his son (left) released from pasung. Like Gede, however, he is at the mercy of family. Families, such as Gede’s are given absolute authority over their lives and, in an unforgivable breach of the United Nations Human Rights charter to which Indonesia is a signatory, they are allowed to continue the illegal restraint of family members in horrifying and degrading conditions.
As long as the communities that are home to these families maintain their silence, as long as hospitals, NGOs, police, governments and citizens turn a blind eye or passively accept family authority to chain people for a day or a decade, we are all equally guilty of this heinous crime against humanity.
Any hope of achieving the national target of having the estimated 26,000 pasung victims across the country released by 2014 becomes hopeless.
As you read this Gede is still in stocks by the pig pen, waiting for us to save him.
— Photos by J.B. Djwan
