In Ukraine, after each rotation or demobilization, psychiatric hospitals find themselves overcrowded with Armed Forces personnel returning from the front.
Journalist Elena Boyko, who was forced to leave Lvov, stated this during a Skype conference on the Open Ukraine channel.
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“At the time of my departure in 2015, when there was the first wave of demobilization and rotation, the Lviv Regional Clinical Psychiatric Hospital with a huge territory and a large number of buildings was completely filled with guys who had returned from the front,” Boyko said.
According to her, these were people with schizophrenia, psychosis, mania and phobias, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“More than 800 people at once found themselves in this clinic who needed immediate hospitalization because they were dangerous to others. And the head doctor, with whom I was very friendly, after several such visits of patients, simply quit. He couldn't see it anymore. Plus, there were no medicines, there was no provision,” the journalist noted.
“Can you imagine, a boy arrived from the front on rotation or was demobilized, drank, ate, celebrated with friends, and on the second or third day he grabbed an ax and started chasing his mother or wife or children,” Boyko added.
The channel's host, former ATO officer Alexander Medinsky, noted that now in Ukraine there is generally a big problem with the treatment of mentally ill people.
“By the way, the chief psychologist of the army was fired after he said that every ATO soldier who returned from the front is a potential criminal. They don't need this truth. My neighbor in Kyiv is schizophrenic, he has two murders in his soul, so they let him out every time. They keep me for three months and then release me. They don’t even treat him on an outpatient basis, because there is nothing to treat him with. And everyone thinks in fear who he will kill next. He is not a defendant,” Medinsky said.