It was a hospital — but to psychologist Inka Weissbecker it looked more like a prison. She had come to South Sudan to check out the country's only health facility for treating patients with mental illness.
"There was a hallway leading past these cells with bars on them," she recalls. "Behind one set of bars I saw a mattress covered in plastic. And on it was urine and feces — and this woman lying with her face to the wall. I don't know if she was dead or just sleeping. Nobody seemed to care."
The year was 2013 and Weissbecker was on a fact-finding mission for International Medical Corps in her capacity as the aid group's adviser on global mental health and psychosocial issues. Shortly afterward she met with the representative of a major international organization that was bankrolling IMC's work in South Sudan to plead for more funding for mental health services there. Weissbecker says she described not only the patients she'd seen at the hospital, but another image that haunts her to this day: a little girl wandering alone in the hallway. "She must have been about 4 years old. She had on a little torn T-shirt and she looked completely lost, with these big eyes. Probably her mother was in the ward, but I don't know for sure. Nobody was paying any attention to her."
[For more of this story, written by Nurith Aizenman, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/go...om-heres-what-helped]
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