‘Patients were chained to walls and beds’: Freetown’s psychiatric hospital released from the past

Patients play football, which was introduced as part of an effort to add therapeutic options, at the Sierra Leone Psychiatric Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Photograph: Finbarr O’Reilly/The New York Times/eyevine

His family had accused him of being a demon, Abubakarr Jallou tells a group of patients gathered in a room at Sierra Leone’s Psychiatric Teaching hospital in the capital, Freetown. When the black magic of a local witch-doctor didn’t help, he was beaten by his brother and cast out of the house, he says.

Jallou, 27, has since been diagnosed with bipolar disorder but he is not happy being here. “They sent me here, but I hate staying here. I’m not crazy.”