Activities in Museum of madness

The Museum of Madness has established itself as a focal point for the conversation about mental health and madness, topics that are often marginalised from everyday contexts.

European documents bind all EU countries, to the responsibility of developing jobs for the care and help of a community, with which people can stay at home and not be moved into assisted living facilities or retirement homes. It’s known too little that, Slovenia is on the second place by rate of institutionalization in Europe. Despite this, the capacity of assisted living facilities and retirement homes has not decreased, but has increased, with the construction of new ones. The situation in 2020 in connection with the Coronavirus epidemic confirmed to us, that the least protected, most vulnerable and people most prone to bad outcomes are the ones that are institutionalized.

At the Museum of Madness, we make the domestic and foreign public aware that Slovenia is one of the most institutionalized countries in the world and that the human rights of people living in institutions are violated. Experience shows that people are poorly informed about this systemic problem and that despite the warnings of the experts there is no political will to carry out the process of deinstitutionalisation, which began and stopped with the closure of the State Asylum for the Mentally and Neurologically Ill in Trate.

Cmurek Castle, with its former "State Asylum for the Mentally and Neurologically Ill" and the efforts of the Museum of Madness to raise awareness of the rights of people with mental health problems, inspires many artists, and this time they have brought in renowned photographer Simon Chang, who has photographed people who have ended up behind the walls of institutions due to their personal circumstances or because of the war, in the psychiatric institutions that are still in operation in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and in Erbil, in the Southern Kurdistan Region of Iraq.