"My great-grandmother did not deserve to be forgotten."

BarcelonaMore than 2,500 deaths in three years. This shocking figure forces us to wonder what happened in the Sant Boi psychiatric hospital, but also in other centers, during the Civil War, a mystery that the ARA tried to resolve through from an investigative report by Sílvia Marimon published in December 2024This Tuesday, the journalist moderated a talk on this issue at the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Complex, attended by historians, doctors, and affected families, with around 100 listeners in attendance.

The high number of deaths in psychiatric hospitals during the war has been a silenced, or at least ignored, issue for decades. Before the publication of the ARA report, individuals had begun to dig deeper into this dark chapter in Catalonia's recent history. One of them is Carles Serret, archivist at the Sant Boi de Llobregat City Council, who uncovered the high mortality rate that occurred between 1936 and 1939. "Before the war, there were one or two deaths a day; in contrast, during the war, there were almost twenty deaths a day," Serret points out. Marimon emphasizes the importance of Serret's work because when she began working on this story, she found that practically nothing had been written down. "There has been a lot of research on the Civil War, but there's no doctoral thesis on this case, for example," he recalls. Josep M. Comelles, a psychiatrist who has published numerous studies on mental health in Catalonia, acknowledges that there is little material.

The Silenced Stories

Behind all the anonymous and unrecognized deaths are personal and family stories, like that of Sílvia Martínez, great-granddaughter of Josepa Puig Rull, who died at the Sant Andreu Mental Institute. She discovered in 2023 that her ancestor had died in a psychiatric hospital; that is, 85 years after her death. "In the family, it had always been said that my great-grandmother had disappeared, and I, since the innocence of being a little girl, didn't understand it. There was absolute silence," recalls Martínez, who began the journey to discover the truth when she was 20 and wasn't able to complete it until decades later. "She didn't deserve to be forgotten," she claims, unable to avoid getting emotional.

The enigma surrounding the death rate in psychiatric hospitals during the war is yet another example of the stigma associated with mental health. "My feeling is that the mentally ill were the last of the last; no one thought about them," reflects Carles Hervàs, a doctor specializing in history and medicine. Hervàs's thesis is reaffirmed when Marimon reads several letters from inmates to psychiatric hospitals: a portrait is created of a meager and poor diet that gives an idea of the dramatic situation experienced in the centers.

Without any certainty about what happened, Marcos Robles, a historian who launched a research project on Catalan psychiatric hospitals during the Civil War after the publication of the ARA (Argentine National Association of Psychiatric Hospitals), advances a possible hypothesis: the lack of resources and the excess of inmates caused the psychiatric hospitals to collapse.