Containing Madness: Care for the Homeless With Major Mental Illness in Yogyakarta , Indonesia

Abstract

In 2014, as part of an effort to create ordered streets for urban transformation, the province of Yogyakarta instituted a vagrancy law (Government of Yogyakarta Special Region, 2014). The vagrancy law mandates that those who are homeless or begging in the streets are to be evicted out of public space and referred to systems of state care. Aimed to the provide welfare to the vulnerable the state brings those evicted from the streets to a temporary encampment called “Camp Assessment” where social workers are expected to perform a series of assessments and formulate care for the vagrant. By June 2015, the state had found itself caring for an unprecedented number of people with psychosis and other disabilitiesHomeless people with a major mental illness, are assessed to determine if they have the “potential” to be “productive” and will be referred to a state-owned rehabilitation center called Panti Rehabilitasi. In the Panti Rehabilitasi, they will be provided with vocational skills with the hope that this would provide employment. This ethnographic project aims explored state care for the homeless with major mental illness to expose inadequacies and gaps within the Indonesian social welfare system.The institutions I describe in this thesis are state-run institutions that try to contain madness by reassemblingrelations of kin. Discourses of individual responsibility and the nuclear family in Indonesia, outsources the containment of madness to the families. This thesis describes the ways through which the biggest burden for the containment of madness lies within families. Human Rights abuses of people with major mental illness in Indonesia are often framed as one abuses of rights in institutions as a result of families abandoning the person (Human Rights Watch, 2015). I have taken a different approach and instead used these institutions to show that available discourses of recovery cannot successful contain madness. I also show that these institutions go to large lengths to make sure families contain madness within their household.