“The new mental hospital - deportation to an isolated place”

Assignment review can tell you about Marika Sellgren who lived a life with psychotic illness, anxiety and depression. After eight years of homelessness, she finally gets her own home through the social services.

However, due to conflicts with the neighbors and an increasingly worse mental feeling, she is eventually evicted again and ends up at the hostel Rysseviken AB outside Stockholm. It is drug tolerant, which means that active addicts can live there with people with mental illness, such as Marika.

- It's the new mental hospital. Deportation to an isolated place where they can wander around without getting help or support in anything, says Lars Erdner, who has been Marika Sellgren's psychologist for many years.

Lars Erdner is critical of the division of responsibility for the mentally ill between the social services and psychiatry - he thinks that it should be merged into one activity instead.

- It's a completely unsuccessful project. That people would manage the accommodation as if they were any tenant. It's not like that. I mean, it's not just a single person in Sweden who has these problems, it's just how many.

Among those living in homelessness, a quarter are in need of psychiatric care, according to the National Board of Health.

- Housing is a prerequisite for getting good treatment. In order for psychiatry to do its thing, people need housing, says Ing-Marie Wieselgren, psychiatry coordinator at Sweden's municipalities and county councils, SKL.

Society is not adapted for the most severely mentally ill, she says.

- I do not see that we seriously prioritize the sickest, the ones where the disease involves a serious disability. We can't say "you've misbehaved", it's part of the disease. Then you should also get priority.

Tom Palmstierna is an associate professor at the Karolinska Institute and chief physician at Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Stockholm. He knows about Marika's case and believes that the old mental hospitals were better than the shelter where she eventually got housing through the social service.

- God, yes. There was care there, but also often employment.

According to Tom Palmstier's experience, it is often when the mentally ill end up in a gap between different care providers that they are "lost" and may end up in homelessness without anyone knowing about it.

- We need more institutions, but there must be good institutions. It doesn't exist today.

Assignment review has applied for Rysseviken AB, they have chosen not to comment.