The years immediately following the fall of communism in Ukraine and Eastern Europe saw the forced closing of numerous asylums for adults and children with mental and physical disabilities. Since then, however, the situation has reversed, as the number of institutionalized children has risen in every former Soviet Bloc country except Hungary. There are currently more than 150,000 disabled children in Ukraine, the majority of which are confined in institutions.

These institutionalized children are, on the one hand, social victims of stigmas about handicaps, mental illness and other physical and mental deficiencies. This is a frame of mind left over from the communist period, when people with such deficiencies were usually shunned or ostracized. Consequently, many of these children have spent most of their childhood in asylums, some of them for 20 years or more now because their parents abandoned them upon learning of their diagnosis.

On the other hand, they are also economic victims, as Ukraine struggles in its post-communist transition from a centrally-planned to a free market economy. With a decline in industrial output, inflation rates that have hovered near 20 percent for the past four years, minimal foreign investment, and lack luster implementation of reforms, economic growth in Ukraine has been stagnant, leaving the majority of the country shackled in poverty.

Asylum patients, already vulnerable, have been hit even harder in this time period, as the demand for care and resources has risen with the number of people institutionalized, while the country’s economic troubles mean that this rise in demand has been met with a detrimental decrease in staffing and funding. Consequently, the quality of care and conditions of these asylums have dropped to deplorable levels that are, in some cases, worse than in communist times. According to UNICEF, nearly 30 percent of disabled children in Ukrainian institutions die before age 18.