On Saturday, a 33-year-old patient of tuberculosis jumped to his death from the fifth floor of Sewri TB Hospital. Mariyappa Kambale was from Raigad and in Mayhad come to the hospital after being diagnosed with multi-drug resistant (MDR) form of tuberculosis.

Kambale was suffering from depression due to heavy medication, which also included an injection every day, according to the doctors. He was also disappointed with his family as no one visited him. Doctors told Mirror that he admitted himself to the hospital in May 2019 as he was finding it difficult to continue with the course of treatment and had lost 35 kg in the last two years. The hospital has sent Kambale’s body to KEM Hospital for post-mortem. An officer from RA Kidwai police station said the victim had provided only his friend’s contact to the hospital and are trying to contact the family through him.

In the last eight years, 24 other tuberculosis patients who were undergoing treatment at Sewri TB Hospital have reportedly committed suicide. Doctors said that most of them suffer from depression as their family members don’t visit them or abandon them for fear of being infected or due to social taboo.

Doctors at Sewri Hospital said that MDR-TB patients require extensive counselling along with extended treatment.A senior doctor from the hospital said that it is not possible to forecast exactly how a patient will react to medication. A few of them become very aggressive, while others can become unusually silent.Also, one of the second-line drugs can cause neurological problems.

Tuberculosis is labelleddrug resistant when antibiotics fail to kill all the bacteria. In this form of the disease, the remaining bacteria become immune to the drugs, which stop having an effect and become toxic. Drug-resistant TB is more common in people who interrupt the course of medication during illness, do not take all their drugs or have suffered from the disease in the past. Patients suffering from the drug-resistant form are required to take as many as 15,000 pills over a period of two years, which is the minimum duration required to recover.

India has the highest burden of both TB and drug-resistant TB and out of the 1 crore patients from across the world in 2017, 20.7 lakh were from India. Among these, 1.35 lakh suffered from the drug-resistant form and 1.24 lakh from the MDR form.

The World Health Organisation issued new MDR-TB guidelines in March 2019 thatnot only does the line of treatment require continuous monitoring, but the mental health of patients also needs to be supervised by the hospital authorities and families.

Dr Lalit Anande, medical superintendent of Sewri TB Hospital, told Mirror that Kambale was regularly counselled by our in-house psychiatrist. They have appointed counsellors in 2015 as cases of people suffering from MDR and XDR (extremely drug resistant) TB have been increasing. The side-effects of medication for MDR-TB include fatigue, nausea, jaundice, deafness and even hallucinations. Very often, patients are isolated to ensure that the disease doesn’t spread, and increasestheir agony.