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Schizophrenia Screening Test |
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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.
It's an unusually cold February. With temperatures hovering below five degrees I am finding it uncomfortably cold. I find that the days tend to look bleak if I watch television for too long. The combined effect of the cold weather and being a passive audience to the tedium of television trivia tends to make me melancholic.
These days the television channels in India are on air for twenty four hours and most news channels indulge in reporting of news in a sensational and dramatic manner. The reporters speak in high decibels and in a frenzy of excitement compensating for the lack of news- worthiness. Even weather conditions are reported from towns and cities which are comfortably accessible. I scout for news in vain to know about the weather conditions in a place where I have stayed - a small, intoxicatingly beautiful town nestling close to the snow capped Himalayas. There is no way of knowing how the people living there are coping in this cold weather.
So one does not know about what is really happening in the small towns and villages of India. The chasm between the cities and the villages of India seem to be only widening with the benefits of the current economic boom touching only the lives of the people living in cities. The villages are neglected. So more and more people are leaving their villages and becoming migrants not out of choice but for survival.
Not as it used to be …. When people left their villages then - it was to seek adventure, to assuage their curiosity, to quench their thirst for learning ....
Today my daughter baked a butter sponge cake for family friends who visited our home. The cake was delicious soft and fragrant with vanilla .....dispelling the chill, warming our hearts with love.