Many people who lived at that time still remember the images from residential institutions for children in Romania that sparked horror in the early 1990s through Western European media reports. Established as places, where the most vulnerable were cared for, an important part of socialist social policy, these places became overcrowded as a result of the pronatalist policy of the late 1960s. The present paper looks at a children’s psychiatric hospital, its closure in 2001 in the wake of EU accession and the structures that followed it as an ethnographic case study placing it in a genealogical perspective throwing light on the discursive structures that lead to the establishment of such institutions, their perpetuation and their closure. Based on archival and library research, as well as ethnographic observations around the former hospital and interviews with both people who grew up in the hospital and people who worked there, the paper seeks to go beyond the objectifying gaze of the human rights discourse into the discursive structures that shaped the creation and demise of such institutions, as well as their discursive legacy that still plays out in the everyday life of their former inmates. Moreover, the paper sheds light on deinstitutionalization as a complex and contradictory process brought about not solely by the pressure due to EU accession, but also by vernacular voices and local developments.
