India: Women With Disabilities Locked Away and Abused

Introduction

A resident sits on the floor in the women’s ward of Thane Mental Hospital, a 1,857-bed facility in the suburbs of Mumbai.

Women and girls with disabilities in India are forced into mental hospitals and institutions, where they face unsanitary conditions, risk physical and sexual violence, and experience involuntary treatment, including electroshock therapy. As one woman put it, they are “treated worse than animals.”

INCIDENTS

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), formerly known as electroshock therapy and often referred to as shock treatment is a standard psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in patients to provide relief from psychiatric illnesses. ECT is often used with informed consent as a last line of intervention for major depressive disorder, A round of ECT is effective for about 50% of people with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder, Follow-up treatment is still poorly studied, but about half of people who respond relapse within twelve months.

• Vidya was alone at home in the Indian city of Mumbai when three people posing as government health workers knocked on her door.

• After convincing the 45-year-old to let them in, they forcibly sedated her and took her away.

• She woke up in a private mental hospital with barbed wire on the windows, where she was medicated against her will and forced to undergo electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

• That her husband had her admitted because he wanted to divorce her on grounds of cruelty and "mental illness".

“Women and girls with disabilities are dumped in institutions by their family members or police, in part, because the government is failing to provide appropriate support and services,” said Kriti Sharma, researcher at Human Rights Watch. “And once they’re locked up, their lives are often rife with isolation, fear and abuse with no hope of escape.”

Problems in Mental Health and Human Rights Violations

There are no clear official government records or estimates of the prevalence of psychosocial or intellectual disabilities in India. The Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare claims a high percentage of the Indian population is affected by psychosocial disabilities with 6-7 percent (74.2 – 86.5 million) affected by “mental disorders” and 1-2 percent (12.4 – 24.7 million) by “serious mental disorders”.

In Pune’s Mental Hospital, the superintendent, Dr. Vilas Bhailume, told Human Rights Watch: “We only have 100 toilets for more than 1,850

patients, out of which only 25 are functional; the others keep getting blocked.”

Pune’s Mental Hospital

• At least 70 million Indians live with psychosocial disabilities like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and more than 1.5 million have intellectual disabilities such as Down Syndrome.

• Yet only 0.06 percent of the country's federal health budget is spent on mental health, HRW said in a report titled "Treated worse than animals".

HRW said physical and verbal abuse was an every day occurrence in every state-run institution or mental hospital its researchers visited.It also uncovered instances of sexual assault and exploitation, which it said were rarely reported by victims for fear of the repercussions.

• It said there are only 43 state-run mental hospitals and three psychiatrists and 0.47 psychologists per million people in India, a country of around 1.2 billion people.

• The lack of mental health services is acute in rural areas where seven out of 10 Indians live but where only 25 percent of the health infrastructure is located, it said.