Mental Prisons

One more hospital visit with Meher. It is so sad to see the apathy which grips this country. The counsellor in charge (she likes to be called “Doctor” although I don’t think she is one!) was sitting on the bench with her patients languidly looking around her. She didn’t bother to greet me when I walked up to her. We were supposed to start the session at 10.30 but by 10.40 we still didn’t have the key to the playroom and half a dozen of us were hanging out listlessly in the little patch of garden outside the building. Finally the counsellor (who doesn’t seem at all interested in even knowing what our work is about, Meher’s and mine) sent us the key to the room with another doctor. (Maybe he really was a daakter, I don’t know. Well, they all wear white coats).

There were seven patients today and we worked with them for about an hour. Several of the ones who came last time have been discharged and there were two newcomers this morning who claimed they did not know why they were in the psychiatric ward of the hospital. Two of the patients are there because they are drug addicts.

Meher told me that two of the patients D and S have been in the hospital for six months. Actually they have already been discharged but their families don’t want them back. So they continue to hang out in the hospital, in the chocolate brown hospital tunic, which makes them look a bit like convicts. The focus seems to be on medicating these guys to just about the level when they cease to be a nuisance to society. There is absolutely no interest in anything more positive than that, in helping them to develop as individuals.