State of mental healthcare a blemish on Kerala Model
The suo motu case registered by the State Human Rights Commission on Thursday on the inhuman treatment being meted out to patients at the Government Mental Health Centre in Thiruvananthapuram is the latest in a series of interventions by judicial and quasi-judicial forums to streamline the affairs of three major mental healthcare hospitals under Kerala’s health department.
In February, after the murder of an inmate by another at the mental health centre in Kozhikode, the district judge, on the directions of the Kerala HC, conducted an inspection and reported many violations. The latest intervention followed an expose by this newspaper on the deplorable conditions at the Thiruvananthapuram facility where patients were found locked up in cells with tin roofs and closed windows. The newspaper’s team found gross violations of patient rights guaranteed by the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017. Section 20 of the Act ensures the right to live with dignity of persons with mental illness. Sadly, patients here are being treated like prisoners and live amid filth.
Reasons ranging from infrastructure inadequacies to insufficient number of staff are cited to justify what’s essentially a case of utter bureaucratic apathy. Though the Mental Healthcare Act was passed five years ago, there hasn’t been any sincere effort from the state government to implement the act in its true spirit. Section 73 of the Act mandates the constitution of mental health review boards to ensure patients’ rights are not violated.
Efforts to constitute review boards were initiated by the state mental health authority only this month. The authority, formed in January 2021, met only once so far though the law mandates that the body should meet at least four times a year. Kerala has always boasted of European standards in healthcare. But mental healthcare remains a blind spot. The inmates of mental hospitals are the most vulnerable section in the health sector. They are voiceless and they don’t have voting rights. The tendency to take advantage of these vulnerabilities is a blemish on our claim of being a civilised society.