In her nine years at the Laura Bonaparte national mental health hospital in Buenos Aires City, Julieta Chevallier has seen suffering widen and deepen.
“When people finally come to see us, it’s usually because they’ve reached the end of their rope,” the social worker told openDemocracy. “What we used to see has now grown sharper, heavier: deeper hopelessness, more suicide attempts, more violence, more acute crises, and a constant anxiety about the economy – even about something as basic as securing food.
“People who had managed to stop using drugs after partially rebuilding their lives with support from social programs are falling back into old patterns.”
At the José A. Esteves neuropsychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires Province, director María Rosa Riva offers a similar warning.
“People are arriving utterly shattered,” said Riva, who has worked at the hospital since 1997 and led it since 2020.
In the 1990s, she said, the emergency room was mainly filled with patients in the grip of severe psychotic episodes, such as schizophrenia. Now, visitors are often experiencing psychomotor agitation linked to problematic drug use, or depression that runs so deep it reawakens latent psychotic breaks, or suicidal thoughts and self-harm – both of which are rising especially sharply among children and adolescents across the country.
Argentina’s mental health began a steep decline after the pandemic, which the World Health Organisation estimated increased global rates of depression and anxiety by between 25% and 27%. In Argentina, this downward trend has deepened since President Javier Milei took office in December 2023 and began drastically shrinking the state.
“Demand for mental health care in the country has risen between 12% and 20% in the past year,” Julieta Calmels, the undersecretary for mental health, problematic substance use, and violence at the Buenos Aires provincial Ministry of Health, told openDemocracy.
“We don’t believe this surge is due to a shift in psychopathology or purely psychic causes,” she added. Instead, mental health authorities from 16 of Argentina’s 23 provinces, including Buenos Aires, which together account for more than half of the country’s population, have written a report putting the blame squarely on Milei’s government.
The document, which openDemocracy has been given exclusive access to and has translated from Spanish, says: “The deterioration of living conditions, growing individualism, the subjective impact of new technologies, and the violent discourse come from political power.”
Across the world, politicians of all stripes continue to gut social services in their respective countries by preaching a simplistic, and false, dogma: That governments must slash spending on social services and shrink the state at all costs. Yet in Argentina, which 15 years ago made a legislative push to improve its citizens’ wellbeing and approved one of the most groundbreaking reforms in the region, austerity-based economics have now worsened the mental health crisis, leaving many service providers under extreme strain as the number of highly vulnerable people soars.
The Milei chainsaw
Since taking office, President Milei has taken his much-discussed ‘chainsaw’ to the country’s healthcare system. His approach has been so extreme that in May this year, Argentina ratified a decision to withdraw from the World Health Organisation.
The budget for the agency overseeing health services was slashed by 70% in the first nine months of 2025. The regulator for medicines, food, and medical products saw its budget cut by 28%. Funding for national hospitals – including Bonaparte – fell by between 30% and 38%. And the National Cancer Institute, which had already suffered a 19% cut in 2024, ceased to exist in 2025.
The government funding allocation for the National Disability Agency, which manages pensions and supports for people with disabilities and is now embroiled in accusations of overpricing and corruption, was cut by 18% this year.
In February of this year, Milei’s government launched an audit into more than a million disability benefits (formally known as non-contributory pensions for ‘work disability’). More than 110,000 have already had their payments cancelled, and the government expects to cut as many as 400,000. Those affected will also lose the health coverage that was tied to their benefits.
The government has also imposed new requirements for applying for the benefit, some of which had previously been ruled unconstitutional.
Even for those who do manage to receive it, the monthly payment is already well below the extreme poverty threshold: last month, it was roughly $206, while the basic food basket cost $365. The basket is the estimated value of a set of basic and essential foods for two adults and two children, but does not include other household costs, such as housing, transport, health and education.
Around 200,000 people have also lost access to private health insurance because they could not afford the premiums after the Milei government deregulated prices. The result was even greater pressure on the public hospital system.
Authorities also suspended the free distribution of medicines for retired workers, including psychiatric drugs and other essential treatments for chronic conditions, although this measure was later overturned by the courts. Meanwhile, the price of medicines has soared, with multiple surveys by industry groups and consumer organisations finding cumulative increases of more than 200% in 2024.
The surge in prices and the collapse of purchasing power under Milei – the minimum wage fell 35% and pensions 23% – triggered a steep drop in medicine sales. Essential treatments suddenly became unreachable for an ever-growing share of the population.
Occupational therapist Celeste Romero knows firsthand how these deep cuts have devastated Argentinian society.
Romero, a professor at the National University of Córdoba and president of the Civil Association Collective Action for Mental Health and Urban Social Integration, works with artisans and entrepreneurs from across the country who face marginalisation, such as disability, homelessness and having been recently released from prisons or discharged from psychiatric hospitals. She helps them to sell their products in a shop in Buenos Aires City.
One of the entrepreneurs is a 29-year-old man who makes origami earrings: cranes, boats, flowers, and hearts that hang delicately from the ears.
“His medication alone costs 900,000 pesos a month (more than $620), “ Romero said. “He gets a 280,000 pesos (about $193) benefit. He has a family who supports him; otherwise, he would fall into a tremendous crisis and hospitalisation… And these situations repeat themselves, again and again and again.”
A landmark law turned into dead letter
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Fifteen years ago, in 2010, Argentina adopted its Law on the Right to Mental Health Protection, a landmark reform intended to usher in a community-based model focused on prevention, territorial care, and the closure of neuropsychiatric institutions.
The law mandated that at least 10% of the national health budget be dedicated to mental health, although no government has ever come close to reaching this figure. The highest annual amount ever allocated was 2.66% of the 2023 budget (Milei came to power in December of that year). Next year, the projected mental health budget is just 1.42% of the national health budget, according to the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ), which monitors public spending.
ACIJ has warned that investment in the only federal program aimed at strengthening community-based mental health care has fallen “abruptly” since 2016. Alarmingly, that programme will further suffer the Milei ‘chainsaw’ treatment in 2026, with an expected 91.53% cut.
“All the potential the law holds has been defunded,” Eduardo Quiroga, a lawyer with ACIJ’s Disability Rights Program, told openDemocracy. “In a context where demand is rising, the national government’s tools to support the provinces should be expanding, not shrinking.”
“For a very conservative administration with no disability perspective, mental health becomes something you must prove, as if it were a crime,” Pilar Molina of Buenos Aires City’s public guardianship office told openDemocracy. The office acts as an ombudsman to protect the rights of children, adolescents and people who require support to exercise legal capacity.
“When someone is missing a leg or an eye, it’s more obvious... It is both regressive and worrying to push mental health back into a framework where its legitimacy can be questioned,” she added.
Hospitalisations rise as support networks falter
Yet the slashing of welfare budgets, coupled with ever-rising emotional and economic precarity, has only served to further stretch an already strained system.
As community primary care was never properly strengthened under previous governments, and Milei’s administration has only weakened what limited services did exist, patients who could have been supported with more light-touch interventions have been forced into hospitalisation.
“With rising demand and a system that refuses to change,” ACIJ’s Quiroga said, “hospitalisation ends up becoming the main public policy response in mental health, even though it is precisely what the law sought to reverse.”
Between 2019 and 2024, there were 45,785 mental-health-related hospitalisations recorded at public hospitals in Buenos Aires province, which accounts for 38% of Argentina’s population. That’s a 60.9% increase compared to the previous five years. During that period, demand for inpatient care for children and adolescents grew by 13.4% and outpatient care by 50%, which “may indicate significant vital crises within this population”, according to the report signed by the provinces.
By June of this year, more than half of all emergency beds were occupied by patients experiencing acute mental health crises, having suffered drug-related emergencies, or recovering from suicide attempts. The latest Ministry of Health figures, published in June, reveal there have been 14,899 suicide attempts that did not result in deaths nationwide since 2023 – an average of 22 per day.
There were also 4,249 suicide deaths in 2024, according to a report by the Ministry of Security in October. This makes suicide the leading cause of violent death in that year, killing more people than road accidents and homicides, and accounting for 9.8 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, a rise of 2.6 points in the last two years. More than 30% of those who died by suicide were aged 15 to 29.
Molina, from the capital’s public guardianship office, has worked with roughly 24,000 children and adolescents across 150 public and private schools over the past 15 months. She sees a troubling pattern emerging: “Signs of fragility in their mental health and in their community bonds.”
Nearly a quarter of children aged between eight and 12 who suffer violence never tell anybody about it, Molina said. Among high school students, that figure rises to 26%, or 38% in schools that face structural difficulties, such as high teacher turnover, weak psychology teams, or poor relationships between administrators, teachers, and families.
And as Milei’s chainsaw continues to rip at Argentina’s social bonds, the crisis has only deepened.
“This is not a warning coming from a 45-year-old adult,” Molina said. “It’s eight-year-olds telling us.”
Diana Cariboni
