“I still recall the scene vividly,” says 61-year-old Mumbai psychiatrist Dr Bharat Vatwani. “My wife, Smitha – also a psychiatrist – and I, watched from across the street.” What they witnessed was a young man on a Mumbai street who had stopped to pick up a broken coconut shell. As they watched in horror, the man then used the shell to scoop up water from the gutter and then drinking it.
Immediately afterward, the two doctors took the young man to the new clinic they had opened for medical care. After determining that he was suffering from schizophrenia, they began treating him for free. As the young man began to recover, he provided Vatwani and his wife with some details about his past life, clues that eventually allowed them to trace his family in Andhra Pradesh, almost a thousand kilometers away from Mumbai.
For Bharat and Smitha Vatwani, meeting this patient launched a three-decade crusade to help India's "wandering", people with mental illness who are roaming the country with no home of their own. "We realised then, that there was no organisation in Mumbai, or for that matter in India, which rehabilitated wandering mentally ill people,” Vatwani said in a recent media interview.
According to one government survey, about 15 percent of India's 1.339-billion population suffer from some form of mental illness. Due to the critical lack of mental health care and qualified mental health professionals, this means that as many as 180 million people are often left with no alternative but to wander across the cities and countryside in search of food and shelter. “Over 80% of the government hospitals in India do not have a psychiatrist," Dr. Vatwani said. "One of the main reasons being that many Indian psychiatrists prefer to move abroad, for better prospects. There are less than 4,000 practising psychiatrists in a nation of over a billion people!” Also, considering the strong stigma against mental illness in India, even people with access to mental health services may be afraid to seek help.
To help reunited mental patients with their families, the Vatwanis established the Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation in 1988 (the word "shraddha" means "devotion in Sanskrit). Aimed at picking up mentally ill people living on the street (85 percent of whom are schizophrenic), workers at the Foundation then take them to the Vatwanis' residential treatment centre on the outskirts of Mumbai. “Our medical treatment is coupled with kindness and empathy, which the patient rarely experienced on the streets," said Dr. Vatwani. "Depending on the severity of the illness, the person will spend anywhere between two to three months at the centre.”
Once the patients are deemed fit to be released into the community, Foundation workers then attempt to locate their families and to arrange for the patients to be returned there. To help them make the adjustment, patients are accompanied to their family home by one of the Foundation social workers. To date, the Shraddra Foundation has a 95 percent rate of reuniting patients with their families with more than 8,000 reunions. “In seven out of 10 [reunions], the relatives are overjoyed at having their missing family member back. Occasionally, in the case of female patients, relatives are hesitant to accept them as they are concerned about what people around them will say. In such situations, the accompanying social worker will explain the importance of having the family’s support and involvement, for the patient’s recovery. We’ve mostly had successful [reunions],” says Vatwani. Many of these former patients have since become successfully reintegrated into the community.
“Anyone can be afflicted by a mental illness and end up wandering the streets,” Vatwani says. “Depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, addiction and other neuroses are so common nowadays. People suffering from these problems need as much love and support as those suffering from a physical illness.”
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