A Study on Mental Health among the Adolescent Orphan Children Living in Orphanages

Abstract

The absence of parental support, affection, attachment, poor mental health, depression, low self-efficacy, social adjustment, and low self-esteem play a significant role in developing risk-behaviour among adolescents (Stiffman et al. 1992; Pao et al. 2000).  Living in poor living conditions and poor care are also traumatic to the orphan child. Children in orphanages are comparatively more ‘unhappy’ and more prone to depression than non-orphan children (Mostafaei et al. 2012) as they lack parental love, support and have less-effective role models, which inadvertently develop into adjustment difficulties and other psychosocial behaviour problems.  The present study of the researchers explores the level of mental health among the adolescent orphan children, living in the four orphanages in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu state. The universe of the study is 217 and the researchers selected the entire population for the current study by using census method .The 54-item multidimensional “Mental Health Inventory” (MHI) developed by Jagdish and Srivastava (1983) was used to assess the mental health condition of the participant adolescents and the required data from the respondents have been collected.  It is found that the vast majorities of the respondents do experience below normal level of mental health and are feeling unhappy. And also they feel bad about themselves; they are not able to cope effectively with the challenges and the negative feedbacks.  And the findings help the care-takers to know the realities of each adolescent and to deal with them accordingly.

Keywords: Mental Health, Care-takers and adolescent orphan children