It was 6:30 on a Sunday morning in May when we set out to visit Chittadhama – the residential unit set up for the rehabilitation of homeless people with mental illness. I had already set up an appointment with the team members of the Chittaprakasha Charitable Trust, which runs the residential unit.
A group of philanthropic professionals set up the unit in 2010, with support from corporate agencies, such as the Infosys Foundation, to care for the mentally ill individuals who have absconded from their homes, to rehabilitate them, and when better, to reunite them with their families.
In India, nearly a quarter of the 78 million mentally ill people are homeless. The overlapping problems of poor socioeconomic status, homelessness and mental illness create a desperate situation for the patients and their families. In some cases, mentally ill people are abandoned by their families, while in some others, they simply abscond from home.
Dementia and schizophrenia are the two most likely conditions to cause a state of confusion, disorientation to time and place, and a lost sense of reality, resulting in patients wandering away from familiar surroundings.
It was 6:30 on a Sunday morning in May when we set out to visit Chittadhama – the residential unit set up for the rehabilitation of homeless people with mental illness. I had already set up an appointment with the team members of the Chittaprakasha Charitable Trust, which runs the residential unit.
A group of philanthropic professionals set up the unit in 2010, with support from corporate agencies, such as the Infosys Foundation, to care for the mentally ill individuals who have absconded from their homes, to rehabilitate them, and when better, to reunite them with their families.
In India, nearly a quarter of the 78 million mentally ill people are homeless. The overlapping problems of poor socioeconomic status, homelessness and mental illness create a desperate situation for the patients and their families. In some cases, mentally ill people are abandoned by their families, while in some others, they simply abscond from home.
Dementia and schizophrenia are the two most likely conditions to cause a state of confusion, disorientation to time and place, and a lost sense of reality, resulting in patients wandering away from familiar surroundings.
