AN ETHCOGRAPHY OF FAMILY BURDEN AND COPING STRATEGIES IN CHRONIC SCHIZOPHRENIA

There is a growing recognition among mental health professionals of the need for more ethnographic studies on local mental health needs, conceptions, and resources in order to formulate more culturally-informed and effective therapeutic strategies at the health-care planning and policy levels. R.L Kapur(1992), for instance, underscores the need for detailed family ethnographies on behavioural patterns and intra-familial relationships, especially in the wake of the changes brought on by industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation in the Indian context. The present paper is a micro-analysis of the ways in which chronic mental illness in a female member is managed by a lower middle-class urban family in Delhi. Through a single case illustration. I argue how a general hospital psychiatry unit may emerge as the only viable option for periodic reprieves for both patients and families in the absence of adequate and acceptable state-sponsored facilities for long-term management of chronicity.