In her nine years at the Laura Bonaparte national mental health hospital in Buenos Aires City, Julieta Chevallier has seen suffering widen and deepen.
“When people finally come to see us, it’s usually because they’ve reached the end of their rope,” the social worker told openDemocracy. “What we used to see has now grown sharper, heavier: deeper hopelessness, more suicide attempts, more violence, more acute crises, and a constant anxiety about the economy – even about something as basic as securing food.
“People who had managed to stop using drugs after partially rebuilding their lives with support from social programs are falling back into old patterns.”
