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Baghdad Mental Hospital on Life Support
Looters Leave Patients without Drugs, Food or Medical Records
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This dispatch was filed for npr.org by NPR's Guy Raz, who is currently reporting from Baghdad.
Most of the patients' conditions are deteriorating because of a shortage of anti-psychotic drugs.
Photo: Guy Raz, NPR News
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Looters destroyed all of Al-Rashad's medical records.
Photo: Guy Raz, NPR News
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Looters even stole the hospital's beds, forcing patients to sleep on the floor.
Photo: Guy Raz, NPR News
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Dr. Raghad Sarsam
Photo: Guy Raz, NPR News
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May 1, 2003 -- In the days immediately following the fall of Baghdad, the al-Rashad Mental Hospital was among thousands of institutions looted and destroyed. But while some facilities managed to cope with the loss of computers and office supplies, at Al-Rashad, looters also ran away with the hospital's supply of anti-psychotic medicine.
Dr. Raghad Sarsam, one of six psychiatrists at the hospital, says he's seen the condition of most patients here deteriorate rapidly.
"The patients are just wandering around. Most of them are agitated," he says. "We don't even have the power supply to provide electric shock therapy in the most severe cases."
Al-Rashad was once among the most advanced mental institutions in the region. British architects designed the hospital in the early 1950s on the model of English garden hospitals.
But now, much of the campus is in ruins. From air conditioners to wires to water heaters to hospital beds to food supplies -- nearly everything was taken. But perhaps more unnerving for Dr. Sarsam are the missing patients. At least 800 escaped from the hospital in the days after the war.
"We have no single trace of them," Sarsam says. "We don't know if they are wandering in the streets, if they are begging or even if they're dead."
Doctors who returned to the hospital after the looting discovered many of the patients wandering aimlessly around the grounds. The medical staff believes at least three of the female patients were raped.
All of the medical records have been destroyed, and doctors are trying to remember the particular conditions of patients in order to reconstruct their case files. No one knows the exact drugs to administer, no one remembers the precise treatment schedules.
But six doctors, including Sarsam, are determined to get the place in order. None of them are being paid. "Even if we have to work for nothing, we'll do it," says Sarsam, "because we have to tend to these patients."
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