By Nikolas Bardis

After the annexation of the Dodecanese to the free Greek State in 1948, many of the Italian buildings that had been built there were empty, a fact that the state decided to take advantage of to house the mentally ill, who until then were overcrowded in the institutions of Athens. Thus, in 1957 and after a relevant royal decree, the green light was given to convert the empty buildings of the Italian admiralty of Leros into a “colony of psychopaths”, as it was typically called.

The first 300 patients landed on the island on 2/1/1958, but over the years their number multiplied, reaching 2,600 patients in 1980! The reason? Patients were brought there not only from Athens, but also from Thessaloniki, Chania and Corfu. These people were literally piled into a tiny place, with their living conditions being tragic. In some wards, in fact, there were up to 180 people together, while the psychiatrists were only two…

All the staff working at the Psychiatry of Leros at that time had a “guardian role”, and came mainly from the locals of the island. In other words, they were not specialized personnel with knowledge on the management of mentally ill people, but fishermen, farmers and breeders who were hired and changed status overnight. This was done so that they could manage the large volume of patients, but the consequences were dramatic, as there was no basic knowledge, no drugs, and no treatment plan.

At the dawn of the 1980s, the first complaints appeared, regarding the poor living conditions in the KTHL. Two years later, in 1982, by decision of the Ministry of Health, the transfer of new patients to Leros was stopped. The images that came to light from the island’s Psychiatric Hospital went round the world, following the particularly revealing Observer article in 1989 entitled ‘Europe’s guilty secret’. And suddenly Leros was in the biggest headlines worldwide, but not for a good reason.

One year later, the director Jane Gabriel is filming the sensational documentary “Leros: Island of Outcasts” for the British Channel 4. The images she captures with her camera are shocking with their brutality of truth, while in the same year (1990) the European Community finances a new program, through which the care of the patients of Leros is undertaken exclusively by certified psychiatrists and specialized workers coming from Trieste. And somewhere then the situation in the colony starts to humanize…

Nowadays the conditions have improved significantly and the Psychiatry now functions as the State Hospital and Health Center of Leros. The workers talking to the camera of Where Greece is, talk about this black page of the modern history of the island, which should not be forgotten, but should remind us that all people, regardless of mental or other kind of illness, are entitled to good living conditions and humane treatment. Let the past be a lesson for future generations, so that the same mistakes are not repeated.