Leyla Safta-Zecheria

Large residential psychiatric hospitals have long been regarded as places of unjust confinement, suffering and sometimes premature deaths. Yet their hasty closure can render people vulnerable and sometimes homeless. My research is based on ethnographic, archival and interview material and explores the tensions between different practices of social abandonment that are at play both in psych- iatric institutionalization and deinstitutionalization in North Eastern Romania.