Few human beings are subject to as much misunderstanding, cruelty, and neglect as world's mentally disabled. Those who have been classified mentally ill or mentally retarded are too often abandoned or hidden away in public psychiatric institutions, which are grossly overcrowded, unsanitary, ill-staffed, and which offer little or nothing in way of medical care, counseling , or training. The mentally retarded are housed with the mentally ill, the young with adults, those who are suffering physical illnesses with those who are not. Abuses such as beatings and rapes go unreported or unchecked. In some countries, the homeless, the elderly who lack families, epileptics and petty criminals are also placed in asylums, because they have nowhere else to go.

Working first as a journalist, later as a volunteer for Mental Disability Rights International, Eugene Richards gained access to psychiatric institutions in Mexico, Armenia, Paraguay, Hungary, Kosovo and Argentina.

Reportage has 24 selected images from Eugene Richards archive of A Procession of Them. A Procession of Them was published in 2008.