Social Acceptance and Mental Illness

Caring for mentally disabled children is a unique challenge in itself. Special children schools and centers have helped improve their battered conditions and given them a home to be looked after, yet there is a broken bridge of social acceptance that needs to be pulled together.

Mentally disabled children walk the roads of alienation every day. The journey has been made less daunting with special schools for mentally disabled. With all the special care and facilities, these schools have successfully provided all that is exclusive to the children’s needs. Though decades have passed since these schools provided rehab to the mentally disabled, not much ink has been spilled over the social aspect of the issue.

The road to accepting these special children with open arms and heart has still not been walked over. Their mental illness has been closely co related to their social acceptance. Time and again, they have been subjected to ridicule, shame and disgrace. Though there are people who sympathize with them, there is hardly anything that they do to make lives their socially uplifting.

Apparently, sympathy is not what our special children want, or even need, for that matter.  Support in the garb of acceptance for what they are is the need of the hour. Instead of looking upon them with contempt and disgrace, treat them as your equals integral to your social herd.

It is a fact that more than 450 million across the globe are battling mental illness. Many of these people don’t receive any proper medication or social attention that they need. Many families keep them enclosed in their homes for the fear of disclosing their mental inhibitions. They are forced to retreat into an empty cocoon which proves to be mentally as well as socially destructive in the long run. All we can do is introspect within ourselves for the pain we are inflicting on them because of our social inhibitions.