Reaching out to the mentally ill destitute on roads

Bharat Vatwani enjoys the gift of a clear sense of purpose in life, and the belief that it is connected to a larger meaning gives him enormous strength.

The Mumbai-based psychiatrist, recipient of the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award and running the Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation in Karjat, outside Mumbai, which has been working tirelessly to rescue and rehabilitate mentally ill people roaming the roads and unite them with their families, was in town recently. His organization has so far reunited nearly 10,000 mentally ill homeless people on the roadside with their families.

Sharing some heartbreaking stories with the hindu, recalled how he met his first patient on the streets of Mumbai in 1988. “I was sitting with my wife in a restaurant and we saw a haggard-looking man with long, shaggy hair talking to himself across the street. He suddenly dipped an empty coconut shell into a roadside drain and drank that water in one gulp. We were so touched that without thinking of any legal implications, we approached him to offer help. He agreed to come with us to our little five-bed nursing home.”

Dr. Vatwani and his wife Smita, also a psychiatrist, were delighted to see him respond to his treatment. He “he spoke good English and told us that he had graduated with a B.Sc in medical laboratory technology and that he had come to Mumbai for work. He didn’t get a job, but he was mentally ill,” he relates, reporting that he wrote to his father, who was a superintendent of Zilla Parishad in Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh. “The elated father took the next flight and came running towards us.”

The couple realized that the rehabilitation of the mentally ill was an important issue that not even social organizations had explored. They began to handle similar cases, and the initial success propelled further progress.

challenges galore

In an attempt to address the challenges of a severe shortage of mental health professionals, low awareness, lack of treatment and care, and stigma and discrimination that further contribute to the plight of the affected population, they established the Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation, which it soon became the destination for the mentally ill with no clothes, no food, no care and no treatment who wander by the roadside.

Citing national statistics, it says that there are 18 lakh homeless people and of them, nearly 50%-60% suffer from mental illness. “We can assume that almost 10 lakh mentally ill people are on the roads and I have reached only 10,000 of them so far,” he laments.

The passion to comfort others stems from his own ‘disturbed’ childhood. His father died when he was a school boy and his mother a homemaker, he, along with his siblings, sold celebrity posters, ran a circulating library, and sold books door-to-door for a commission. . “I could relate to most of my patients’ problems,” he says.

Take a multi-pronged approach

Reaching out to the hapless population stripped of all human dignity, the Shraddha Foundation took a multi-pronged approach in helping the mentally ill get off the streets, providing them with shelter, care and treatment and reuniting them with their families, as well as undertaking activities to raise public awareness . .

The biggest challenge, he says, came in 1995-1996 when local residents of Mumbai’s Dahisar, where the couple built a 20-bed psychiatric institution, opposed his plan and moved the court, which after a protracted battle, handed down his verdict. Vatwani’s favour.

Inspired by social worker Baba Amte’s “Anandvan” near Nagpur for lepers, the Vatwani couple established the second branch in Karjat on the outskirts of Mumbai in 2006.

Having gained experience in uniting patients with their families, her organization now works in collaboration with 42 NGOs and state mental health institutions across the country. “We collect partially or totally treated patients from psychiatric hospitals and NGOs and unite them with their families through our network of volunteers who come from all over the country.

Dr. Vatwani says that families’ joy and elation at seeing their loved ones keeps them going. “Kindness spreads in waves. We do not know where the end point of that wave will arrive. It is just that one should not lose hope in the power of good, ”he emphasizes.