Bareilly: A 25-year-old woman, suffering from schizophrenia, was found wandering in the streets of Bijnor in February. Due to her illness, she could not tell her address to police and ended up at Mental Hospital Bareilly as an unidentified woman. After two months of treatment, she was partly able to tell the address, following which the hospital staff contacted a few village headmen from Bijnor and traced her family to a remote village in Moradabad. In April, her aunt and uncle, who had raised her after her parents died at a young age, were happy to take her back.While only two unidentified inmates of the Mental Hospital were reunited with their families in 2015-16, the number rose to nine in 2017-18, thanks to the efforts made by the hospital staff. These patients had been admitted to the hospital on orders of the district magistrate after they were found wandering on the roads. Some were reunited with families as far away as Jharkhand and even Nepal.The hospital currently has nearly 20 patients who are categorised as “unidentified”. Dr CP Mall, director of the mental hospital told TOI, “After a PIL was filed in the Supreme Court for the rehabilitation of inmates at mental hospitals, who have recovered but are unable to go home, our staff has been taking special efforts to reunite such unidentified persons. As we realised that language was a barrier in most cases, we started taking the help of the internet to translate what they say. Also, we are trying to teach the local Hindi dialect to inmates. Even if a patient partly recalls his or her address, we contact local residents of their native area to find their family.”Apart from unknown patients, 198 patients, whose address and families were known to the hospital were discharged by the hospital in 2017-18 and 198 were discharged in 2015-16.Mall said that due to the stigma attached with mental illness, several families refused to take back patients even after they are fit to be discharged from the hospital. “A man in his fifties has been living in Mental Hospital for 18 years now. He is fit to be discharged and longs to go back home but can’t, as his family doesn’t want to take him back. We took him to his home in Haldwani, Uttarakhand in an ambulance in November last year but as her wife came to know about it, she locked the house and left. Our staff waited in the ambulance for eight hours but his wife wouldn’t come back. The neighbours said she didn’t want to take the burden of keeping him. Our staff even took him to his sister’s place, who also turned him away. With nowhere else to go, the man came back to the hospital,’’ said Mall.

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