From Mayukh Goswami
Mangaldai : When the rising cases of mental illness has become a matter of global concern , a grass root study by a non government organization working in the community health sector in Assam’s Darrang district since long has found that close association of mentally ill patients or persons under depression with their pets may be very much useful for retaining a good mental health . SATRA , a Sipajhar based premier NGO in their study on the feedback of their innovative livelihood support of goat rearing to eighty patients just recovered from mental illness has brought to light that the initiative not only helped the patients with poor financial back ground to earn substantially well to purchase the requisite medicines , the business of the patients with the domestic animals also worked just like a part of treatment for a good mental state.
On the basis of a end line survey of a community health programme done earlier by SATRA covering 106 patients and 106 care giver across 30 villages of Darrang district which brought to light the very poor financial conditions of most of the patients and their families, the NGO developed a pilot project on ‘goat rearing’ as a source of livelihood aiming to keep the patients busy and enjoy doing the activity as there is a well-documented cycle between psycho-social disability and poverty. “ In the project we provided three female goats to almost each of the patients who has recovered from mental illness with regular medication. Requisite training on scientific goat rearing was also offered to them with the estimation that even if they fail to get free medicine following the expiry of our mental health programme, each patient will easily be able to bear the cost of medicine.” said Nani Saikia, Executive Director of SATRA . “ A patient has to bear maximum of Rs 200 per month. Since a goat gives birth to two/three kids half yearly and selling a matured goat at around Rs 3000 in the market , such a patient can continue his medicine at least for year without any break.” Saikia added. “Our initiative paid dividend as their financial status improved reasonably well within year or two . More importantly it has also been observed that their close association with the goats gave them enough mental food to stay mentally strong .” , he included.
