‘As I entered the dimly lit corridor, the stench of human excreta hit me. This combined with the dampness in the air, weighed down on my consciousness like a manic depression. The feeling stuck to my senses for days later like a stain that would not wash off. Wandering around aimlessly along the long stretch of the corridor were the inmates – blank faces, unwashed bodies, lice infested hair. Some gazed at me with frenzied eyes – reflecting a mind at conflict with itself.
I was visiting one of our country’s mental asylums to see a recently admitted relative – a young girl called Chetna. Her aging parents, no longer able to cope up with her violent bouts, had no choice but to temporarily admit her here while they looked for a better place. An ‘asylum’ was a misnomer for a place that was more like a cage than a shelter, where the mentally insane were ‘put away’ from the ‘normal’ society. Under funded and under staffed, like most government institutions, this too was run with equal apathy and incompetence.
If there is anything worse than insanity it is partial insanity. Chetna, like many other inmates, lived on the edge of reality – at times conscious of her surroundings, the filth and the stench, the insane world of her fellow inmates; and at times withdrawing into her schizophrenic world of hallucinations, depressions and uncontrollable anger. I saw her sitting in one corner talking to herself and then break into a mocking laughter. Perhaps she knew something that we did not; perhaps she found our world crazier than her own.
It is a general belief that it matters little how one treats an insane person since they are barely in their senses. On the contrary, patients like Chetna live through twin nightmares. The inner created by her schizophrenic mind and the outer, created by an insensitive society.
Fortunately for Chetna, her parents found a shelter home for her run by an NGO – a much saner and humane place. However for the remaining inmates of the mental asylum there is no escape from the twin nightmares of their real and schizophrenic worlds.
