Treatment of the Mentally Ill

While walking home in the evening, I came across a women lying in the middle of the road, screaming in agony at the top of her lungs. It looked like her arm was bloody, and my first thought was that she had been hit by a motorcycle. There was a small group of people standing back on the road observing everything, so I quickly approached them to see if they knew what had happened. They did not. They told me that she was mentally ill, however. They seemed unwilling to do more than watch, so I went to the woman. She had a large head wound and her shirt sleeve was soaked in blood. She was crying and moaning that her head and arm hurt. I tried to ask her what had happened, but she did not respond. One man came over and said he thought she had come from the hospital. We asked her again and she said that she had been at the hospital and they drove her away, she returned and they beat her. The man nodded and explained that she often disturbed patients there and that this was a likely story. It is no secret that people with mental problems are not treated very nicely here. In town, people often make fun of them, push them away, or even throw things at them. However, it was saddening to believe that a hospital would do this to anyone, let alone a mentally ill patient. The hospital, of all places, should understand how to treat and handle someone suffering mental health issues. This left us in a bit of a dilemma. In her condition, under normal circumstances, I would have recommended that she go to the health center to receive treatment. However, if it was the health center that did this to her in the first place, that was no longer an option. I doubted that the police would be very helpful, if any of them could even be contacted or found. We were able to extract a relative’s phone number from her, and immediately called him. He was in a different town, but said he would call another person to come and collect her. In the meantime, I decided to go to the hospital (only a short walk away) to find out what had actually happened. I arrived at the hospital and found a nurse. I began to ask her if the woman had come to the hospital. “Yes, she was just here.” I then mentioned that she had some wounds and might have been beaten… “Oh yes, it was me,” the nurse replied. “She came in and scattered my things and put on my sleeping cap, and so I beat her well and then the guard brought her to the road.” Mystery solved. It was so disappointing to hear the health care worker talk about how she had beaten a mentally ill patient to the point of bleeding, all because the lady had put on her sleeping cap. It’s times like this that I become discouraged or disappointed with this country. How could someone hurt another human being like that? Beatings are rather common here, but normally it is a small slap to the arm, or a hit with a stick to a school child—still things that I don’t approve of—but not to the point where you have done true physical harm to the person. To beat somebody until they are bleeding from their arm and head is incomprehensible to me. I tried to advise the nurse on how to treat the woman in the future, but it didn’t leave much room for hope. We went back out to the woman, who started to wander off despite our pleas for her to stay. We called her relative one last time to let him know where she could be picked up, but that was as much as we could do.