There are 725,000 severely mentally ill Indonesians who receive no treatment at all and some of them in restrained condition. A sad situation but even that central government of Indonesia do nothing and prefer to just simply said “It’s terrible. It’s a situation that should not happen. Not only in terms of psychiatric diseases but in terms of humanity”. There are no willingness to help nor admit their foult of creating useless program in treatment the mental disorder. Most of the psychiatrists in the nation just prefer to work behind the desk and just said “The biggest problem for [Indonesians] is collective denial”. In a sense they just want to say, “We wait the patients but there’s no body coming to our hospital”
One treatment model gaining increasing interest is the work of Dr Luh Ketut Suryani, a remarkable Balinese psychiatrist who used traditional spiritualism and meditation – as well as anti-psychotic drugs – to achieve results with those in pasung. ”Most important of all is the acceptance back to the family, the community,” she says. ”One pasung patient we cared for was in [confinement] for over 40 years. It took us three months, three injections and some therapy. The last time we visited him, he was doing well. Back with his family and communicating with others in the village.”
As the only psychiatrist that regularly come to the community, she found that the system for treating mental illness need to be change. She sees an inefficient health system prone to corruption, and a mental hospital that is more like an old-style asylum.