Experience Of Kathika Essay

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 doesn’t bother; she goes whenever she wills, sometimes in the middle of the night, walking all the way to her parents’ house. She doesn’t listen to anyone. When the researcher met Karthika, her mother had gone to her parents’ housed and Karthika was alone at home. Karthika narrated how once her father warned the mother against her going home every now and then.

When in that woman’s house, poor Karthika has to do all house hold chores there. That woman has two children and is separated from her husband who is also a mental patient. The woman treats Karthika very badly and uses abusive words always. Even when Karthika is sick she has to do all the work. When she says that she is sick that woman would say that Karthika is pretending. In addition to that she speaks ill of her mother. Karthika bemoans that all this happens to her because she is a girl.

“When my brother lives happily in my father’s house with all our relatives, why should I alone live with an outsider? I often think of leaving home and going somewhere. Why should I live on earth at