12 mentally ill netted every day in Jakarta

JAKARTA (JP): The city authorities have netted an average of 12 people considered as "mentally depressed" on the capital's streets everyday in the past three months, an official said on Saturday.

The head of the city's rehabilitation agency for mentally ill people, M. Sihombing, said the huge number of new arrivals had turned the city's three rehabilitation centers into "something like overloaded buses".

He added that most of those picked up were from cities in Java and Sumatra.

They became normal again "after being treated at our rehabilitation centers here for two weeks," he told The Jakarta Post.

A senior employee at one of the city's rehabilitation centers said that preliminary examinations of the new patients revealed that they had become depressed after being unable to find jobs here.

"They refused to return home because they'd promised to send their families money soon after they got a job," Supranowo of Panti Sosial Bina Laras Harapan Sentosa 02 rehabilitation center in Cipayung, East Jakarta, said.

According to Supranowo, the three centers had so far succeeded in returning some 150 patients to their respective families in the same three-month period.

The centers, each with a capacity of 200 patients, are currently home to 1,000 people, most of whom are suffering from psychiatric illnesses.

Some of the people netted from the streets by the Public Order officials and police were considered "dangerous to the public" as they're always violent toward other people, Supranowo said.

He added many were drunkards and wife beaters.

A number of people with psychiatric problems have been beaten to death by angry mobs in several parts of East and Central Java recently. Unable to properly answer questions about their identities, the victims were then accused of being members of the unidentified group who has murdered clerics in the last few months. They were then brutally murdered. (ylt)