Goa: Abandoned, cured patients find unwilling home at asylum

PANAJI: A peculiar problem at the Institute of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour (IPHB), Bambolim, has left the authorities scratching their heads — many patients do not go home even after they’re cured, and stay at IPHB till their death.
Many of them either have no family, or are abandoned by their kith and kin.
Information obtained under the Right to Information (RTI) Act reveals that as of December 2019, 76 patients have been residing in IPHB for over five years, and since 2013, 29 patients have died while at the institute. It is, however, unclear if they had been declared mentally fit, as the IPHB didn’t have the relevant records.
“It is not possible to trace patients as some of them are from outside the state and are unable to recall their home address after recovery,” an IPHB official said. The problem is more acute in the case of women patients, authorities say, as it’s practically impossible to trace their residences. Some of them — either abandoned or lost — don’t even remember their home state.
“Many of these patients had never before moved out of their house, let alone travelled,” said an IPHB official.
“Male patients fare better, and are at least able to recall some details like the name of their village or directions to their residence.”
The institute, which admits on average three patients a day, has 190 beds. In 2019 alone, it saw 1,104 admissions. Many of the institute’s patients with behavioural problems are picked up by police personnel and taken to IPHB for treatment. Some of these are brought in straight from Goa’s railway stations. “In these cases, the person is made to board a train and naturally, they disembark at the last station (Margao).”
In recent years, the internet has come to the aid of the authorities, who often use the resource to track the families of patients on the basis of sketchy details they provide. “However, our efforts don’t always bear fruit,” an official said. And when there’s no immediate family, “they continue to remain at the hospital”.
Meanwhile, the Goa government has proposed a “half-way home” to accommodate IPHB patients who have recuperated, or require more time to recover but are unable to go home for lack of family support or absence of family.
GMC dean S M Bandekar said that he is aware of the problem. “The chief secretary has approved the proposal for the half-way home,” he said. “Patients with no families, after their initial treatment, will be placed in the half-way home and looked after.”
In the past, 38 IPHB long-stay patients were discharged and housed at Provedoria, the government’s institute of public assistance.