Institutional Sharada

When Erving Goffman wrote, in his milestone book ‘Asylums” that mental institutions too have a dark underbelly, he probably didn’t foresee it being prevalent even after 60 years.

Pramit was living in Behrampore Mental Hospital for the last 5 years. Recently, Anjali was able to facilitate his reintegration. During this time, Pramit was vehemently opposed to going back home. When we probed, he told us that he was due Rs. 14, 580 from the hospital staff. On enquiring further we’ve come to know the following :

• Hospital staff (nurses and group D staff) make the residents do their work- making the beds, cleaning the toilets, feeding and cleaning other residents who’re unable to do it on their own, cleaning utensils and various other menial jobs
• They are paid 10-12 rupees for each of these jobs
• The staff pay them this money and then take loans from them with the promise of interest
• These amounts keep accumulating and a lot of residents are yet to be paid back the money they have lent
• The residents negotiate with the staff to be paid in cash rather than kind (cigarettes and food) so that they can go and purchase whatever they want, on their own

Pramit, while narrating this story, said “as patients we are not supposed to be doing this kind of work, right? But we do it for the money” Arjun left after a great deal of coaxing, but not before he entrusted the responsibility of retrieving the money onto the Anjali team at Behrampore.

As a human rights based mental health organization who are first and foremost agents of these residents, we marvel at these intelligent negotiations that these residents make around the regressive, non responsive mental health systems, but we are also extremely concerned about these transactions where the residents stand to lose their rights. While we feel validated that the residents trust us to deal with their hard-earned money, we are appalled at the lack of intervention by the hospital and district authorities.

Anjali never interferes in these transactional matters of the residents, because we practise autonomy, we don’t think anybody else has the right to make any decisions for them, neither do we believe in the hierarchy of jobs and work. But we will step in again and again where there is a violation, where the power scales are tipped away from the residents.

Is this really any different from the several chit-fund scams we have seen where the perpetrators give with the promise of more, only to take back even more from the unsuspecting people who had put their faith in them? Is it alright to take advantage of people already stigmatised against because of institutionalisation? Is the hospital dark underbelly inevitable?

We ask all of you. Please let’s engage in this conversation.