POLEWALI, Indonesia: Locked up all day in a tiny, squalid hut with barely enough space to lie down, Rauf is a prisoner to his mental health issues and carers whose only way of coping is to shut him away.
"We don't want him to be infected by the virus as we learned that things are now getting worse," said Hasni, Rauf's aunt who looks after him in Polewali in West Sulawesi. "This is the tragedy with the pandemic that it is happening in so many countries including across Indonesia," said Kriti Sharma, a senior disability rights researcher for Human Rights Watch .Indonesia's Health Ministry said it had recorded more than 6,000"shackling" cases in the first half of the year, a rise of more than 1,000 on the whole of 2019.
Indonesia's health ministry - which has registered nearly 300,000 people as experiencing mental health conditions - said it had recorded more than 6,000"shackling" cases in the first half of the year, a rise of more than 1,000 on the whole of 2019.