New Delhi, Sept. 22: A government report has recommended legal measures to safeguard the rights and welfare of women inmates of mental asylums, from ensuring proper care to providing financial help in rehabilitation after discharge.

One of the suggestions is that all government and private psychiatric institutions must be registered under the state mental health authority. Not all mental asylums are now registered.

The report asks the ministry of health and family welfare to have independent agencies carry out an annual "social and gender audit" of all mental institutions - that is, give a detailed description of the circumstances of each inmate's admission and progress along with a gender and age-wise break-up.

It has suggested that all women leaving mental institutions after being declared fit be provided financial support to help their re-integration into society.

One key problem the report deals with is the abandonment of mentally ill women by their families, which makes it difficult to rehabilitate them after discharge and forces many of them to stay back in the institution even after being completely cured.

The size of the problem is emphasised by the finding of the study - commissioned by the women and child development ministry last year - that 60 per cent of women in mental asylums are married and 30 per cent of them are homemakers.

"Many (cured) patients reported that they want to go home. Either their addresses cannot be traced because of illness, or they have been deliberately abandoned by their families. Some families do not want to take the patients back and provide wrong addresses at the time of admission," says the study, carried out by the National Commission for Women and the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, Bangalore, which surveyed 10 mental institutions in Maharashtra, Goa, Kerala, Bengal, Jharkhand, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.

Some of the reasons for abandonment include "property or inheritance issues, overall lack of awareness and stigma in the community et al".

At Calcutta's Pavlov Hospital, "only 10 per cent of those fit to be discharged are reintegrated with their families", the report says.

"Provision for after-care visits by psychiatric social workers should be ensured for fit patients discharged by psychiatric institution," it adds.

To ensure that no family can force a healthy woman to stay in a mental asylum, the report has recommended that every application for admission is accompanied by certificates from two medical practitioners - one of whom must be a government psychiatrist - and that these are not more than 15 days old. Currently, one certificate is enough to admit patients to mental asylums.

A mental health care bill that is being drafted will punish institutions that admit patients without the necessary certificates.

The report says that mental institutions must make child-care and day-care facilities available free of charge to women inmates who have children aged up to 18 years. If the child is younger than six, "a relative or guardian may be permitted" to stay with the child at the institution to "ensure that the child and mother are not separated".

The report has suggested that the children of mentally ill women will not be declared free for adoption without the consent of the mother before a doctor has assessed whether she is capable of giving meaningful consent.