In south India, Kerala state, an amazing place named “the private land of God”, ?every year thousands of people being abandoned on the streets by their families. The addiction to alcohol or drugs, rather than merely suffering from mild emotional disturbances, represent a stain to hide in order to safeguard the good name of the family.
Very often, the outcasts take refuge in alcohol which affects the mental health, and increase the number of alcoholics in this country, the highest of the entire Indian sub-continent.
In Kerala, as in most parts of India, the shame, for diseases or heatlh disorders of various kinds that may affect social status, is something to hide from the society, it’s a taboo, a stigma which ashamed of.
The abandonment of a relative from the family is common practice in response to the least manifestation of mental deficiency or addiction to drugs, alcohol and any motivation that can stain the family name.
Also it is again too much frequently find the so-called illegal children in the streets, those conceived outside of marriage often as a result of rape, that may permanently impair the credibility of relatives in the prosperous market of weddings still in force.
Having a bad reputation impairs the ability to ‘negotiate’ a good marriage. In fact, in Kerala, as elsewhere in India, is still in force on the marriage market, which precisely stipulates that health conditions are optimal, and that the ethics integrity of a family, is the minimum requirement to ensure a lineage ‘healthy’ and ‘strong’. Illnesses and emotional disorders represent a danger to the genetic inheritance of future children.
Market rules of marriage provide that girls, apart from being spotless, should not have relatives “uncomfortable”.? For a father having a daughter is to have a duty to buy an husband, in fact, marriage is a transaction of sale and purchase managed by head of household and this is done regardless of the views of the future spouses who frequently do not even know.?Women must, by definition, pay the dowry to her husband.
During the last two decades, the state of Kerala has the highest number of suicides in the Indian sub-continent and it seems that the main cause is due the collapse of emotional people who have stood the pressure of an abrupt economic development in this country. In Kerala commit suicide every day 24 people and about 100 trying to take his own life.
In 2010, the total number of suicides was 8556. In the same year, the number of suicides of entire families has reached a number of 56 victims. This has obviously generated a high number of orphans. The sudden economic acceleration has left behind many people and these, in an attempt to chase riches seem to everyone, many go into debt up to the impossible and, finding no way out, the heads of families choose to kill himself along with all people they are responsible for.
In Kerala the assistance for alcoholics, orphans and the alleged mentally ill is entrusted to voluntary organizations for the most part, they are supported by donors and non-governmental organizations, but in most cases do not have sufficient health and sanitation systems but also do not provide no psycho-physical rehabilitation program. Given the lack of subsistence state, these structures only provide hospitality and food, so patients are taken off the streets and locked up in inadequate facilities from all points of view.
