Hidden Away

This photograph really stopped me in my tracks. It is beautiful, and yet you know that the story behind it is a terrible one. It's from the latest Asia Edition of Time magazine -- a cover article entitled Hidden Away: Stigmatized, abandoned, often locked up, Asia's mentally ill are left to inhabit a living hell.

Kids at the Edhi facility in Karachi -
some as young as seven years old -
reach out -- photo by John Stanmeyer

It's a big problem. Government institutions are under-funded. The wealthy have access to drugs and psychiatrists, but psychiatrists are few. The tendency is to try to hide mental illness within the family, for fear of being talked about by the society. And for the poor there is nothing.