Experience Of Karthika's Psychology: Challenges Of A Mental Disora

Case 7

Experience of Karthika

Karthika is a seventeen year old adolescent girl who belongs to a traditional Hindu family of Kerala. Her family consists of her parents and her twin brother. Her father is a government employee (document writer). Her mother has been a schizophrenic patient for ten years. Father’s family doesn’t like Karthika and her mother. They often say that Karthika will become a mental patient like her mother sooner or later. They say it runs in the family as her maternal grandmother too was a psychiatric patient.

Challenges

Since the mother is sick, she often goes to her own home and returns only after many days. When the mother returns home the father will be so angry with her because she had left the children alone. But she

She loves her mother dearly although she is sick.

“The family members of my father have told me that they will not protect me. They have told me to stop my studies this year”.

The school is the only solace to her. She explains the condition of her family, “I feel as if I am in a prison. When will I be free from all these?” All these questions pose a great challenge before Karthika.

Achieving mature relations with same sex and opposite sex

“I have got many friends even though I speak less. All my friends know my life and circumstances. All of them support me very much. They pray for me together”.

She believes that all of them are good friends. Even though she has many friends among girls, she doesn’t keep friendship with boys. Her father has strictly forbidden her from making friendship with boys. Karthika brings her friends home since the mother is away most of the time. Mother doesn’t welcome friends when she is at home. She doesn’t like visitors. But she doesn’t show any malice towards them.

On rare occasions, mother would ask,

“Why are you taking these girls to our home? I don’t like you to bring them