CHENNAI: The city Corporation, along with the National Health Mission, is set to organise a special drive to rescue homeless persons with mental illnesses on Thursday. Activists and experts believe that such mass rescue drives, while leaving room for errors, may also infringe upon basic rights.
According to Corporation officials, during a survey to identify persons with mental illnesses around 400 were found. "The aim is to rescue as many as possible," the official said.
Senior lawyer Sudha Ramalingam who also runs 'Anbagam' said, "We cannot just do a clean sweep of persons with mental illnesses off our streets. They all have varying degrees of illness, some may not need institutional care at all. In these cases, their fundamental right to live wherever they want will be infringed upon. "We need to come up with long-lasting solutions on the basis of each person's needs, and be more empathetic in our approach.
Vaishnavi Jayakumar of the Disability Rights Alliance said that the better approach would have been to organically rehabilitate those with mental illnesses requiring institutional care, week after week and year after year. "Would this (a mass drive) be the most dignified way to rehabilitate persons with mental illness? They could have been carried out in a more localised way with people who will be able to build trust, speak to them and get their consent" she said.
According to Corporation sources, the civic body has already identified areas where there are wandering homeless individuals with suspected mental illness.
Archanaa Seker, a Chennai-based activist asked what stopped officials from rehabilitating the wandering mentally ill then and there instead of reserving the rescue for a specific date. "There should be a systematic sustainable State response as and when they come across wandering mentally-ill individuals. When it's carried out on a specific day, it becomes all about numbers and targets. In addition, they may not be able to find the people they had earlier identified when they go back again," she said.
However speaking to Express, Dr Poorna Chandrika, director of the Institute of Mental Health said, that this could not be called a 'drive' and the process of rehabilitating mentally-ill persons who do not have a home was an ongoing one. "This is only the start of the journey and is to help bring awareness on how persons with mental illnesses should be treated and to reduce the number of wandering mentally-ill individuals and find a shelter for them to be rehabilitated in," she said.
Officials stressed that individuals would be taken in only after a preliminary consultation with psychiatrists and if there were cases where individuals have been found to be picked up without suffering from mental illnesses, they will be sent back.
Three schools have been identified for conducting RT-PCR tests for rescued and for preliminary psychiatric consultation.