The World Health Organization estimates that one in four of us will have a mental health disability at some time and many more have intellectual disabilities. With many States having ageing populations these figures are set to rise. Yet despite these very high numbers of people concerned, they remain at the margins of society, their human rights frequently ignored.

The reason is that many people still fear or pity disability. Fear and pity lead to stigma, stigma to discrimination and discrimination to abuse. Once a culture of stigma, discrimination and abuse has become entrenched, so too does resistance to change.

Over 50 years ago the holocaust saw many children and adults with disabilities detained, tortured and murdered by the Nazi regime. Human rights abuses continued after that period and hundreds of remote and closed institutions across the region were used to house what were considered to be ‘non-normal’ people. Even now people with disabilities are segregated from society in these institutions with the ideology of segregation continuing to shape the basis of much mental health and social care services in parts of Europe and central Asia.

It is not only people with disabilities who disappear in these institutions. The practice of detaining people in them for political reasons during the communist times has been well documented. It is a practice that continues in certain countries in the region, most notably [1] in Russia. Nonetheless, for each political detainee there were, and remain, thousands of people with disabilities existing the same institutional regime and suffering the same neglect and abuse.

It is this history that has led to the need for MDAC’s work and which has shaped its approach to addressing that need. Read more about what we do [2], and about the impact [3] of our work.