We need to talk about mental health in Rio’s favelas

Felipe Araujo
14 min readSep 24, 2016

Three people, three favelas, three journeys. What they share: a daily battle with mental illnesses. These are their stories.

Rocinha favela. Photo by Felipe Araujo.

Stray bullets. Those have been Yuri Ibraim’s biggest fear since he was a child and, according to him, one of the root causes of his mental disorders. The social sciences and cinema student is “pathologically anxious” and “severely depressed”, but it’s only recently he has become aware of the seriousness of his condition.

I met Yuri at a popular shopping mall on a hot Sunday afternoon in São Gonçalo, Niterói — the city that stares back at Rio de Janeiro from the other side of Guanabára Bay.

Cordial and soft-spoken, his answers were short, his gaze vacant. I couldn’t tell for sure if it was his personality, or if he was under the effect of the medication he takes daily.

Ten minutes in, the 21-year-old told me, in an eerily casual manner, he had tried to take his own life the previous night by overdosing on pills. Had it not been for his mum arriving home just in time, we probably wouldn’t be here having this conversation.

Yuri Ibraim. Photo by Felipe Araujo.

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