Sun, plants and marmalade: Dismantling mental health stigma in a garden

The roulette wheel spins, settling on the number three. Host Christian Navas, who received today’s 11 visitors to the garden, approaches the board, lifts the appropriate flap and reads the prize aloud: “You won the right to spend the rest of your days locked up in an asylum.” The adults laugh. Another guest sheepishly gives the wheel a spin. Her reward reads, “You will spend your last days on the streets.” This time, there is less laughter.

The game is called La vida del loco (A crazy person’s life) and it’s the first activity on a guided visit to Huertomanías, a work co-op located in Nayón, a northeastern neighborhood of Quito, which was founded to employ people with mental health issues like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression. “As you can see, this is the harsh reality. Sometimes people don’t have family support or even a medical diagnosis or correct treatment, and many live in the streets or are committed. We are excluded from society,” says 47-year-old Navas, who has been a founding member of Huertomanías since 2015.

Such weekly tours, designed for psychology and psychiatry students and occasionally open to the public, helped Huertomanías to win the Óscar Arnulfo Romero V Prize for Human Rights Education in June, awarded by the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI). The project stood out among 27 initiatives from across Ecuador, based on its strategy for comprehensive mental health literary.

“Huertomanías is very comprehensive, because aside from raising awareness about people with mental health issues and the stigmas they face, it also creates productive participation and sources of employment,” says Sara Jaramillo, director of OEI’s Ecuadorian office, who was a member of the jury for the award. Huertomanías will represent Ecuador in the regional competition, to be held in September in Brazil, and will compete against winning initiatives from other OEI member countries.

Navas joins in the group’s applause and invites them to the next station. “We are already part of the change. We work to have freedom, work and autonomy, our key principles,” he says.

Connecting with the work

On a black wooden wall in the kitchen hang images that tell the history of the cooperative. Huertomanías began operations in 2015, but it was inspired by a conversation about the needs of people with mental health problems that took place a year earlier, at a meeting for people who were using state psychological services. Aimée Dubois, a 42-year-old clinical psychologist and Huertomanías’ director, was at the assembly and heard the testimonies.

Dubois remembers that the first problem that the patients addressed was lack of medication. But she soon noted that the common denominator of the rest of their issues was economic autonomy. She recalls how patients said they couldn’t study or work “because social stigma had made them believe that they could only shut themselves up in their homes or a hospital so that they weren’t dangerous.”

Huertomanías is located on a 26,900-square-foot parcel of land that belongs to the Dubois family. Of this number, 10,800 are used for cultivation. At the beginning, its budget came from selling the fruits, herbs and vegetables its team harvested at organic food markets. They then began to make their first processed products like marmalade, salsas and pesto, but they were artisanal, not licensed for commercial sale. Today, two of their trademark products are licensed: a marmalade made from zambo squash and passionfruit, and an olive oil dressing with peppers and spices. Both are sold in a well-known delicatessen chain.

Navas’ coworkers, dressed in denim aprons and black-and-yellow hats emblazoned with the cooperative’s logo, pass out crackers spread with the aforementioned marmalade to their visitors. Others distribute servings of a ragout made with organic tomatoes. Navas shows off the rest of the products, which will be available for purchase at the end of the tour: honey, grilled salt and Huertomanía hats and mugs. Their most recent creation is Placebos, candies made from “99% emotional support and 1% sugar” that are recommended for toxic relationships, burnout syndrome and procrastination.

Dubois explains that “the complexity of Huertomanías requires a complex and constantly improving system” to divvy up profits and losses. At the end of each month, each partner’s stipend depends on the number of points they have accumulated. More work, more points. “It’s not a punitive system. No one loses because they didn’t do something. The idea is that they always gain from carrying out an activity, like arriving on time and helping their peers. You don’t always have the energy to do everything every day, but the goal is to do something and always connect with the work,” she says.

Half of profits go to stipends and the other half is re-invested in the garden. With this capital, the Huertomanías team builds stations — for example, the one where they dry herbs for their infusions, which have pun-laden names that play with the Spanish word for tea, té, and the second-person pronoun te: Té lo cura (I’ll cure you), Seda-Té (Sedate Yourself), Demen-Té y Cedrón (Crazy and Lemongrass).

Shifting stigmas via language

Allusions to craziness and the word “crazy” are abundant on Huertomanías’ social media and in colloquial Ecuadorian Spanish. Craziness is equated with exaggeration and carelessness: “You scream like a crazy person,” “don’t act crazy.” At the cooperative, they use the terms humorously, stripping them of their power to hurt. “For me, it’s a way to start a dialogue, to ask ourselves why the word is used in so many euphemisms, why we spend so much time on using ‘fancy’ words if in the end, attitudes don’t change,” Dubois says.

Felipe Paladines, who is 42 years old, directs the visit’s last activity: the posters. Upon their arrival, each person receives a two-sided poster. On its front, they are told to write a positive quality. On the back are written predetermined negative characteristics like “dominant,” “toxic” and “envious.” “For an hour and a half, you have carried these words,” Paladines explains. “What would have happened if instead of these, you had written schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety? You would have thought, this person is crazy, I’d better stay away from them.”

This disparity has had grave repercussions for 52-year-old Shoana Pavón, one of Huertomanías’ nine partners. She has severe depression and anxiety, which are exacerbated by the symptoms of her sickle cell disease blood disorder and pulmonary hypertension. When employers saw the 50% psychosocial disability classification on her ID card when she applied for teaching positions, they’d reject her as a candidate. In Ecuador, according to the Ministry of Labor, there are 19,478 people registered as having a social disability due to mental illness. Of these, 2,453, about 12%, are in the workforce: 1,650 in the private sector and 803 in the public sector.

“My age, my ethnicity, my gender and my diagnosis have made it impossible to get work,” says Pavón. With the $200 a month she earns working half-time at Huertomanías, she is slowly paying off her debts and is able to contribute to paying expenses at her parents’ home, where she lives.

Alicia Ruales was close to her father. She did accounting work with him until he died in 2019. She says that his absence “detonated” her illness and after his death, she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder with bipolar disorder and anxiety. To get her to leave her room, her sisters proposed bringing her to a “childcare for old people.” Luckily, someone told them about Huertomanías and she went with them on a guided visit.

At 51 years old, Ruales has already been a partner for a year and two months. She says that membership comes with benefits: “My crises don’t happen as frequently,” she affirms. Her favorite pastime is working in the garden. “The contact with the earth really helps me relax, to think about other things. It’s different from being shut up in an office. Here I feel the wind, I smell the plants, I listen to the birds and I raise my head to see the blue, clear sky. That brings me peace. A lot of peace.”

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