Ten days. That is how long it has been since Ljupcho from Skopje was last seen, and his family is still driving from location to location, collecting information and posting appeals on social media. The case was reported to the Skopje police department, the Interior Ministry announced that measures are being taken - and the man is still gone.

Except this is not a story about a disappearance. This is a story about everything that happened before it, and that is where the real problem starts.

His nephew Darko went public, and there is not a single sentence in his post that sounds like surprise. The family, he says, warned repeatedly. They reported his behaviour. So did the residents of the building where he lived. Not to harm him - the nephew's own words - but "so he could be helped in time and it would not end in tragedy".

The referral they obtained, and the hospital with no room

Here comes the part that shows most clearly how the system works when a citizen asks for help. According to the family, during one of their visits to the police they were told that admitting Ljupcho to hospital care required a referral from his GP. They got it. They submitted it. And then they were told there was nowhere to place him - the hospital is being renovated.

Read that sequence again. The institution demands a document, the family produces the document, and then the same institution explains why the document means nothing. Who designed a procedure in which a man whose treatment has been interrupted waits for renovation works to finish?

"If he is calm, we have no grounds"

The second answer the family got is even more telling. During one of the last call-outs, the police station informed them that there were no legal grounds to act if the person is calm at that moment.

Formally - perhaps correct. In practice it means the response to someone who needs help is decided by how he looks during the five-minute window while the officer is standing in the flat. The condition of a man who has stopped taking his medication does not change depending on who rings the doorbell. The family knows that. The neighbours know that. Only the procedure does not.

The question the nephew asked in public

"Today Ljupcho has been gone 10 days. And now we ask: where was the system when we asked for help? Where were the police when we warned? Why does the family have to organise itself and go looking for him?", Darko wrote.

This is not a journalist's rhetorical question. This is a question from a man who has not slept in ten days. And so far nobody in authority has answered it publicly - not with an account of what was done about the reports, and not with a figure for how many such reports end up in a drawer each year because the person "was calm at that moment".

The family is asking for an urgent, organised search, but also for an answer about what was done in the period before the disappearance. "We are not leaving this like this. We will go all the way. Not only for Ljupcho. But so that tomorrow the same thing does not happen to another man whose family asks for help and is left alone with it", the nephew said.

Anyone with information about Ljupcho's movements can call 073-717-090 or contact the nearest police station. Until then, the search is being run by the people who warned this would happen.