Homes for Frustrated Candidates

Today is the last day of campaign for candidates running for the General Election on 9 April 2009. Starting tomorrow there will be a cooling down period during which those candidates are not allowed to talk and/or do anything in public that can be considered as campaigning.

I can imagine that those candidates must have been doing everything they can and spent a lot of money during the campaign period. This is obvious because there are so many candidates who are competing for only very few seats in the parliaments.
According to Media Indonesia, there are 11,215 candidates competing for 560 seats of the People’s Representative Council (DPR), and 1,109 candidates competing for 132 seats of the Regional Representative Council (DPD). Beside that, there are 112,000 candidates competing for 1,998 seats of the Provincial Parliaments (DPRD I) and 1,500,000 candidates for 15,750 seats of the Regional and/or Municipality Parliaments (DPRD II).
Due to these facts, it can be ascertained that most of the candidates would fail, therefore very disappointed or even frustrated.
In order to anticipate this, the Department of Health has asked 32 Mental Hospitals throughout Indonesia to provide treatment for those frustrated candidates. Unfortunately, those hospitals only have a capacity of 8,500 beds.
However, Kompas Newspaper quoted Dr Faried Patuti, a Psychiatric at a hospital in Bogor as saying that candidates who are elected also face the risk of having a mental breakdown too, because he/she does not expected will win. Mental hospitals preparing for those frustrated candidates include hospitals in Bogor, Samarinda-Kalimantan, Grogol-Jakarta. They will be placed in VIP rooms charged much higher than normal patients, ranging from Rp 80,000 to Rp 288,000 per day.

In conclusion I felt sorry for those candidates who are too ambitious to reach their goals which are very difficult to achieve. But I am happy that the Mental Hospitals have made anticipatory preparations to treat candidates who failed to be elected in the general election on 9 April.