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Photo: K. Pichumani

Empathy is the key Mentally challenged should be dealt with extra care and affection

Prasad’s (an autistic child) extraordinary capacity for visual thinking finds expression in drawing pictures. He is busy making a paper bag, neatly torn as if cut with scissors. But he doesn’t allow his pictures to be seen by or be shown to others. He stops twisting and flailing, his eyes stop shifting, for two minutes. Then the 13-year-old starts again.

These children in Janani Institute of Mentally Challenged suffer from a range of disorders along the spectrum that includes Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), Asperger’s syndrome, Down’s syndrome and autism. Their capacity for survival, for communication and social interchange is so impaired that they find it hopeless to navigate the unpredictable world. In their ever-shifting mental space, a word or an action has to be repeatedly hammered into to take root.

Repeating familiar chores and words, staring into blankness, withdrawing into the black hole of the mind often helps them get through the day.

Surya Prakasa Rao, a man who hawks clothes on his bicycle, walks his seventeen-year-old younger son Shiva Prasad to the institute daily. “He was not able to walk and do anything. It was heartbreaking,” he says. “After regular training at the institute, including physiotherapy, it is o.k. now.” Shiva cannot ask what he wants so “we have to be constantly alert to his needs.” Initially, it was difficult to cope with the fate and the man would often ask “why my child? What sin did we commit to deserve this?” But the acceptance came sooner than later when instead of feeling terribly sorry for his son and for himself, he tried to look into ‘who his son really is and his potential’. “The things we take for granted like picking up a glass, on being asked, become, in Shiva’s case, a ‘monumental achievement.’ I feel overjoyed at these miracles my son performs,” says a beaming Rao. He has one worry, though. With tears welling up in his eyes, he muses: “It’s alright for my son so long as I and his mother live. But what will happen after we are gone?”

Karuna is the mother of four-year-old Sasidhar. “When we learned that he wouldn’t be normal our world crashed.” She feels it “heart-stopping when kids his age scamper to school and he lies in a heap”. She has, however, come to accept it and takes care of him by sitting with him at the institute.

“They don’t have self-image. It’s not that they cannot learn. It is all about how they learn best,” says Hari, the 32-year-old genial special education teacher. “The training is functional and teaches them how to be slightly independent, how to go to bathroom and clean, how to receive others, how to count,” he explains.

Through trust and traction, “we develop their potential,” says the director of the institute, Hyma Leelavathi. “We train girls in handling their privacy and hygiene and how best they can cope with limitations,” says Natarajeswari, another teacher. “This problem is not so much an illness, as it is a handicap. One can minimize its effects and hope for improving productivity over time,” says Hari.

Bosu Babu likes to be a “doc…or”. Prasanna Kumar’s favourite cricketer is “Sachin”. Vijaya Bhaskar assists in school and says confidently “I am” and “I work”.

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