Russia is home to some of the world’s most dangerous prisons. Thanks to one Reddit user’s photo diary, it might have the creepiest mental asylums as well.
The photos were taken by Ignatius Asinus (twoeazy) who, at the time, was a 22-year-old who was told to join the asylum after a conversation with an Army psychiatrist.
“In Russia, we have compulsory recruitment,” Asinus wrote on Reddit. “Every recruit must go through a course of doctors to check if he’s somehow ill. So, when I had an honest conversation with psychiatrist, he decided to send me to asylum for a whole month for a bunch of reasons.”
He took these photos:
The experience was a twisted combination of Silent Hill, a popular horror video game series, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Asinus stayed on the asylum’s third floor, where there were “much more sane people.” The first floor was more like the run-of-the-mill asylum you’d imagine, featuring rooms with padded walls. The second floor was filled with more “normal” people, while the third was more laid-back: It allowed people to have cellphones, laptops, and instruments to pass the time, he said.
Asinus shared the following desctiption of what the asylum personnel and other inmates were like.
One guy’s all-time business was to walk around the hallways. Three times a day he eats his meds and starts walking for about 4 hours. He explained it, like, “Um, I don’t know. I just can’t sit still with these pills”.
The other guy, one of my roommates, was constantly talking with himself, and what’s especially cool, he didn’t admit he’s doing it. It was especially creepy at nighttime. I was, like, “Hey, did you just said something?”, and he’s like “No, I didn’t”. Some time passes and he says something weird again, and shit gets really creepy for some reason.
Plastic windows were a third floor’s feature. When I was on the second floor, cold wind at night was almost unbearable, so I often slept fully clothed.
Most of personal just didn’t cared about us. Women were more friendly than men, though. Also, some of the men personnel were criminals in past. It was a mix of extreme fun and nightmare to talk to them.
Despite the few amenities offered to third floor inmates, Asinus’s life was not easy.
“It was a very tough month for me, and it restricted me from some things in my further life,” Asinus told me. “The right to drive a car, for example. Also, it didn’t, of course, cured any of my mental issues and added a couple of new, including repeating nightmares.”
Visit Imgur to see the full album of Asinus’s photos.
Photos by Ignatius Asinus (twoeazy)/Imgur
