lease don’t send me away. I will do any menial job and live on here,” Kamalamma (name changed) pleads fervently with a doctor who asks her about her kin and where they live.
That’s a question she had dreaded for the last 15 years, ever since she was deemed cured and fit to be discharged from the Government Mental Health Centre at Kuthiravattam in Kozhikode.
In her mid-forties, she was brought to the health centre when she was 20 years old. She now does odd jobs such as of a cleaning woman at the centre, which has come to be her home for life. But Kamalamma cannot recall the home she once had somewhere within her recessed memories that she cannot access despite being cured, her relatives, or how she ended up in the Centre.
She is not alone. There are another 122 inmates of this centre deemed cured and fit to be discharged, but have nowhere to go. They are declared fit for discharge when it is ascertained that they will no longer harm themselves and are capable of living again in a social milieu.
“We have 73 such people from Kerala and 50 are from other States. They cannot return home due to various reasons,” says superintendent of the health centre N. Rajendran. Rejection by family tops the list. Inmates not even remembering their homes is next.
A few days ago an inmate was taken to her home at Attappady in Palakkad district, but was rejected by her relatives who refused to take her in. “The fear of social stigma is still too strong,’’ says Dr. Rajendran.
Psychiatric social workers at the centre have the hard task of ferreting out information from inmates from other States, to try and trace their families. They could, in many cases. But not all.
As a result, the centre is already overloaded with a steady inflow of new patients, and it is now struggling to retain cured inmates. Like Kamalamma.
Rehabilitation for the inmates has been limited to a few vocational training programmes, mostly just to keep them engaged.
That is a far cry from anything close to actual rehabilitation efforts, which involves a lot of handholding to re-acquaint them with the society they had left behind.
They could have been handed over to a separate rehabilitation facility proposed in a master plan for the centre, but that remains on paper.
“Without proper interventions by the authorities concerned, the Kozhikode centre, which was once rated among the best in the country, will be reduced to an orphanage,” Dr. Rajendran said.
The fear of social stigma
is still too strong
