A Mother in India

Suicides and Mental Illness in India - Feb 2008

Today while clearing out old newspapers and magazines my daughter came across an article. She wanted me to read it which I did. The article was chilling. It was about assisted suicide for people with severe incurable illnesses. I cringed as I heard her say, "This could happen in India - government assisted suicide for people with serious mental illness. If our government continues like this, ignoring the suffering of millions of people with mental illness …..this would become the only option."

Listening to her words, I felt the surge of helplessness but I managed to respond that such a thing would not happen. The fact is that India has a National Mental Health Programme since the nineteen seventies. Yet most Primary Health Centres in India are not equipped to identify mental illness. As for Awareness Campaigns - there are none. The staggering number of suicides prevailing among young men and women in India is being met with apathy by our Government. Our future generation who has the immense potential to contribute and enrich our society is being decimated by suicides and the Government of India's response is just a deathly silence. I can't help but feel that these are a kind of assisted suicides - knowing the fact that people are killing themselves yet doing nothing about it.

Thank you S for the thought provoking comments.
The research you mentioned - if is it the one about those being treated for schizophrenia having a better prognosis if they are in a developing country.....wasn't that a WHO research done more than twenty years ago when the milieu was very different from what it is now? Today India has the largest number of poor people in the world who have to pay out of their pockets for health care when they fall ill because they have no other options. Government health care services are insufficient and inaccessible. India also has the fourth largest number of millionaires in the world. Despite the economic boom the income disparities in the population are only increasing.

Prayers and faith do help to some extent in dealing with this illness. But it is so unpredictable and complicated when a person has schizophrenia. I know a middle-aged woman with schizophrenia who gets solace in religious rituals on some days. The rest of the time she is in such a state of religious fervor that she is not able to do anything else - even eat or speak coherently.

Thank you, Sunil - for sharing your thoughts on meditation. Meditation did help my daughter to some extent before her illness. After she became ill attempts to meditate have only led to frightening experiences. During meditation she can no longer perceive herself within her body. She says that the boundaries of her body become blurred. After this she cannot even recognise her own reflection when she looks in a mirror. The reflection is that of a stranger she says. There is then so much of disconnection in what she actually sees, smells, hears, tastes and feels from what she perceives. It takes her days to recover - to feel whole again and resume her normal activities.

As for Yoga, these days my daughter is able to do some Yoga asanas. She was able to do yoga only after the doctor changed her medications some years ago. Yoga helps her. It keeps her energy levels at an even keel. She avoids pranayamas which involve holding the breath even if it's for a few seconds. That precipitates acute confusion.

Posted by survivor at February 6, 2008 02:02 PM