28/02/2023
"This journey took off one fine day in 1988 while sitting in a restaurant. My wife and I noticed a young boy who was in very bad shape, sitting just across the road. Being psychiatrists ourselves, we could make out that he was a schizophrenic.
We brought him to our newly set up private nursing home.
The nursing home setting up had involved us selling all the jewellery which my wife had received as gifts in our marriage and taking loans from various banks with property hypothecation et al.
This unknown schizophrenic was the first indoor admission to our nursing home. We nursed him, treated him with appropriate psychiatric medicines and gradually he improved. In two weeks, to our utter astonishment, he started speaking in English.
It turned out that he was a Bachelor of Science (BSc) graduate, had even finished his Diploma in Medical Laboratory Technology (DMLT) and had come to Mumbai to hunt for a job, and upon not getting one, had succumbed to mental illness and ended up on the roads.
We wrote to his father who came down by flight from Hyderabad as he was desperately hunting for his son for almost a year. It turned out that he was the Superintendent of a Zilla Parishad in the Cuddapah District of the state of Andhra Pradesh.
This was the realisation of the fact that mental illness could affect the best of the best and reduce a person to pathetically inhuman conditions and there was no organisation dealing with such people.
Today our Rehabilitation centre stands strong proving itself to be a time-tested and a very hopeful humane experiment in itself, providing treatment, protective care and rehabilitation to a neglected group of wandering mentally ill roadside destitute and reuniting them with their lost families (loved ones) and correspondingly spreading awareness in the farthest corners of India during and en route reunions.
This model has spearheaded more than 9,000 reunions and seems to be capable of replication at a national level vide shelters run by government and NGOs, addressing the very much existent issue of mammoth quantum of homeless destitute roaming around aimlessly on the streets pan India and other neighbouring countries as well."
~ Dr Bharat Vatwani, Founder of Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation
