SOFIA (AFP) - Bulgaria is being forced to clean up its mental health institutions, which have been described as places worse than prison, as the former communist country prepares to join the European Union.
"These establishments are dumping grounds where people are robbed of the right to any activity and wait only to die," said Krassimir Kanev, the president of the Helsinki Committee, a non-governmental organization that investigated the institutions for the past three years.
In a report titled "The Islands of the Forgotten", it says that once psychiatric patients have been committed to one of these places, they never leave, even those who could easily be treated and then reintegrated into society.
The country's 52 psychiatric homes are mostly delapidated buildings, often old factories, barracks or even stables on the outskirts of cities, according to the report.
A lack of food, heating and poor hygienic conditions contributes to a "criminally high" mortality rate among patients, particularly in winter when it snows for months in Bulgaria.
Last year 11 percent of the country's institutionalised psychiatric patients died, said Stanimir Petrov, another member of the Helsinki Committee.
The corpses are often used for medical research and proper funerals are rare, he said.
Amnesty International has also investigated Bulgaria's mental institutions, describing conditions in 2002 as "shocking" in a report that deplored "continuous discrimination against the mentally handicapped."
The government concedes the reports are accurate and has set aside more funding for the institutions, but officials complain that the money disappears before reaching its destination, a reference to rife corruption.
"The government's limited resources used to be earmarked mostly for the reform of our orphanages, not leaving much for the mental asylums. Then in 2004 more money was set aside for this but it did not bring the hoped for improvement in conditions," said Ivanka Christova, deputy minister of welfare.
Georgy Hadjinedelchev, a doctor who used to work at a mental health asylum in Kniajevo just outside Sofia, said funds his institution received never translated into better conditions for the patients.
He lost his job after he told the Helsinki Committee that there was a history of abuse by the staff and that in 2003, 64 of the 100 patients held here died.
The charity's members found that those who were seriously ill or violent, or who had tried to escape, were locked up behind bars or chained to their beds. In Lakatnik, a village north of Sofia, they found a woman who had been kept in solitary confinement for 28 years.
"In their treatment of the mentally ill, Bulgaria is at the bottom of the pile of the former communist states," Kanev said.
Christova said the government was aware that the problem had to be resolved before Bulgaria's hoped-for accession to the European Union in 2007.
"Bulgaria is regularly criticised by the European Commission for its treatment of the mentally ill and we have to resolve the problems in these institutions in a year or two, before we join the European Union," she told AFP.
Christova has recently announced several emergency measures.
She said the government planned to put patients who were moderately ill but had been abandoned by their relatives, in houses where they could live in conditions resembling that of a family.
It also planned to open outpatient treatment centres for those whose families were prepared to take them back home.