V
Bhargavi for the International VAW campaign, Dec. 2005,
Pune
Bapu Trust, Pune
I was five or six years old the first time I knew about violence
against women who were labeled with a mental illness. My mother,
Bapu, was a spiritual person, spending a lot of time in prayer, bhakti and
penance. As she was from a highly traditional, Tamil Brahman
family, her bhakti was misunderstood. She was labeled
as “mad” and put in many mental hospitals, both private and public.
She would escape and seek refuge in Guruvayur and Chotranikara,
healing temples in the South of India. They (my father and his
family) would send the police after her. She was arrested, chained
and brought back to institutional life. They put her many times
behind bars, in solitary confinement, in the mental hospitals.
They chained her to her bed and gave her shocks without anesthesia.
My family and her family abandoned her. She lived many years
of adult life as a wandering mentally ill person, writing poems
about god and about hunger.
Mental
hospitals in India are still the same, after thirty years.
They perpetrate violence and abuse against their healthcare
patients, and especially women. We, at the Bapu Trust, Pune,
have done extensive visits of mental hospitals in Maharashtra
and Gujarat. Women are dumped in mental hospitals by their
families without any conscience and for flimsy reasons. Most
women are kept in small, overcrowded, bare, locked, closed
wards. Solitary confinement still exists. Women are shut into
grilled locked rooms, 10 feet by 10 feet, which are completely
bare. They are kept naked, no toilet facility is there. They
have to use a small pit at the back of the small room. The
solitary confinement rooms in the women’s wards of Maharashtra
mental hospitals are the most degraded and inhuman violence
committed against women within the mental health service system.
In some places of Maharashtra, such as in Sangli / Miraj areas,
doctors are still proudly using “direct ECT”, i.e., shock treatments
without anesthesia.
International
covenants such as the European Convention on the Prevention
of Torture talk about direct ECT as barbaric and as a kind
of torture. Another PIL is pending before the SC, filed by
a mental health NGO, Saarthak, which asks for a total ban on
solitary confinement and direct shock.
In
mental hospitals in Maharashtra, women live with infections,
lice and other infestations, gastro intestinal problems, reproductive
health tract infections, skin infections, tuberculosis and
other respiratory problems, diarrhea, and gynecological problems.
They live in near total neglect of their health status. They
are not given undergarments and their heads are shaved. There
is a joke in the mental hospital that you should be careful
about your dupatta: The women may pick it up for use
as sanitary cloth.
In
the 1980s, an aggrieved son of a woman institutionalized at
Yerawada, Mr Sukri, filed a PIL after his mother died of abject
neglect in that hospital. The District Judge asked to inspect
the facilities at the time, deplored in no uncertain terms
the abominable conditions at the said hospital. Ms. Malati
Ranade, a committed social worker, was a member of the Mahajan
Committee which inquired into this incident, as ordered by
the esteemed Court. She wrote many articles and also filed
subsequent petitions before the esteemed court, noting again
and again that the Committee recommendations were totally whitewashed
by the said hospital.
Women
labelled with a mental illness face violence in the community.
Families are ready to abandon them in beggars’ homes or mental
hospitals, and if nothing else, then on the streets. Beggars’
homes are no better than mental hospitals, as they do not provide
any form of rehabilitation program or a decent life for the women.
The illness ward in Chembur beggars’ home has been written about
and there is a PIL against this institution. The conditions here
are still the same. Women lie, naked and unconscious, in their
own excreta. Many organizations and NGOs working with the poor
and homeless, such as Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan, New Delhi,
have asked for a repeal of the Bombay Prevention of Beggary Act,
and the closure of beggars’ homes. A “good governance” philosophy
is something that staff in these institutions has not even heard
of.
The
police and the beggars’ home authorities have a weekly “quota”.
They have to pick up so many people on the quota system. The
police and the authorities mindlessly arrest people and take
them before the court. The “arrest” of beggars, both the statute
and the procedure, are violative of fundamental freedoms and
the basic human rights principles. Women suffer in this process,
as they lose their families, children and community, and can
never go back.
Other
governments, such as Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, have
made several steps to improve and strengthen the mental health
system in their state. The Gujarat government has made a draft
mental health policy for finalization. This policy encourages
State-NGO partnerships and gives a large role to community
initiatives in mental health. Sadly, Maharashtra Government
is lagging far behind. Some state mental hospitals such as
the Ranchi CIP improved with many years of monitoring and vigilance
directly by the High Court. The Maharashtra State Judiciary
stopped with closing the Mahajan case, instead of keeping up
the pressure. A crisis situation, such as the Erwadi incident
in Tamil Nadu, is waiting to happen in Maharashtra.
Bapu
Trust for Research on Mind & Discourse
Kapil Villa, Plot no. 9
Survey No. 50/4, Kondhwa Khurd
Pune-411048
Tel: 020-26837644/47
Email: wamhc@dataone.in; info@camhindia.org
