Health

Buenos Aires –  La Colifata, the world's first radio station created by patients of a psychiatric hospital, marks its 20th year on the air in 2011 and will celebrate the occasion this week with the start of 24-hour-a-day broadcasting and by airing its programs around the world over the Internet.

Current and former patients of the famed Jose Tiburcio Borda Hospital in Buenos Aires have only broadcast up to now on Saturdays, over its own low-power frequency, to a few neighborhoods of the Argentine capital near the medical center.

Beginning Tuesday, the "colifatos," which in Buenos Aires dialect means people who are loco or lunatics, will air content 24 hours a day, and for the first time will transmit live over its Web site www.lacolifata.org, on which only recorded fragments from previously broadcast programs could be heard up to now.

The main Saturday program will be rounded out with recorded bits from the station's massive archives accumulated over the last 20 years, and from new productions as they are created, hospital officials told Efe.

"But all this is not just to keep building bridges to the community - it will also allow patients at the Borda to be the audience of their own radio station and tune into programming every day from the hospital," the officials said.

A campaign has been launched to donate portable radios to patients of the psychiatric hospital so they can listen in to their own programs.

The founding of Radio La Colifata goes back to 1991, when psychologist Alfredo Olivera established a radio workshop at the Borda Hospital to provide therapy for patients under treatment at the medical center and for those already released.

The success of the project was such that today there are more than 50 "colifata" radio stations around the world, while about 50 radio stations in Latin America, Canada and Spain broadcast content from La Colifata.

Patients at Jose Tiburcio Borda Hospital have also taken part in documentaries, TV commercials and a number of recording projects.

In 2007, the Franco-Spanish singer and producer Manu Chao recorded a disc with the "colifatos," who, two years later, took part in an album of the Spanish group El Canto del Loco (Song of the Loco).