Isolation, mounting debts add to mental health issues among migrant workers

KUALA LUMPUR: Chandra Mogar, 42, gives little away.

Seated at a Nepali restaurant tucked away in the city centre, the small-built security guard answers each question politely and briefly.

“I was happy. No issues,” he said, as if the mental health episode that left him hospitalised had never happened.

Purna, a representative from the non-profit Pravasi Nepali Coordination Committee (PNCC) Malaysia, fills the silences, painting a fuller picture — one that Chandra himself seems reluctant to share.

“What I have observed from him is that he would work at one place for three months, then when he does not like it anymore, he would move to another place,” Purna said, adding that Chandra has repeated this pattern for the past four years.

Yet in the same breath, Chandra said he was happy. Purna gave a small shrug.

The “episode”, which occurred in January, began when Chandra woke up dizzy with a headache and vomited through the night.

He went to hospital, was warded for a day, and remembers nothing of the three days that followed.

“After four days, I came to my senses. I do not know how,” he said in an interview in January.

Purna said during those three days, Chandra called him repeatedly, ranting about missing money that was actually in his own bag. He knocked on dormitory doors at odd hours and asked, in daylight, to be taken into the forest at night.

“He would say many things,” Purna said.

Chandra listened with a faint, awkward smile.

Purna believes the episode was caused by alcohol withdrawal.

Chandra arrived in Malaysia eight years ago, leaving his wife and son in Nepal. He worked 12-hour shifts and lived in a dormitory where his social world extended to three or four friends.

He drank at least 350ml of alcohol every night, the equivalent of a small water bottle, after every shift. He had drunk in Nepal too, but drank more here.

Purna drew a distinction between what he called the “originals”, branded bottles sold in licensed stores for around RM90, and the contraband that circulates among migrant worker communities at RM35 to RM40 a bottle.

The duplicates are mixed by hand and sold illegally. A bottle might be labelled 48 per cent alcohol. The actual content, Purna said, is anyone’s guess.

Alcohol, Purna said, is only one of three pathways that lead migrant workers into mental health crises.

The second is mobile gambling, where workers lose an entire month’s wages in a single night and face the morning unable to pay debts or send money home.

The third is stress from workplaces that demand more than a person can give, and families back home that need more than a person can send.

Chandra had the third as well, though it took a colleague of Purna’s to say it aloud.

His son had been calling him for money. His wife does not work. Chandra had stopped picking up the calls.

When it was mentioned, Chandra fell silent and looked at the table. The poker face, for a moment, slipped.

“He does have family issues,” Purna said.

It took Purna, the Nepal embassy and several weeks of administrative work to get Chandra, who was undocumented, repatriated under the government’s Migrant Repatriation Programme.

He cannot return to Malaysia.

A week after the interview, he boarded a plane home to a country where there is no work, to a wife and a son whose calls he had stopped answering.

“I miss them,” he had said. It was, in the end, the most genuine thing he said.

CRUSHED BY STRESS

In a shoplot on the other side of the city, a young, frail man sobs softly by his bunk bed, barely mustering a response when Purna greets him.

Pais, 22, came to Malaysia to work, with the unglamorous ambition of sending money home.

A month after arriving, he fell ill. His company took him to a clinic, then a hospital. The diagnosis was syphilis — treatable, curable with time and the right medication.

But his fellow workers in the dormitory had repeatedly told him that what he had could not be cured, that he was going to die. He believed them.

“When you’re already stressed by your circumstances, and colleagues tell you that you are going to die from an incurable disease, his mind becomes distorted,” Purna said.

Pais could not eat. He had grown visibly thinner. His head spun constantly. He could not work, which meant he could not earn, which meant the debt he had taken on to come to Malaysia kept growing with nothing to offset it.

He waited weeks for the infection to clear before he could return home.

The waiting, in a dormitory where the men who had told him he was dying still lived and worked, was its own cruelty.

Purna sat with him for nearly half an hour, moving between reassurance and crude jokes that drew a faint smile, then another. By the end, the sobbing had stopped.

“When I met him, he was crying uncontrollably. What you see now is a lot of progress,” Purna said.

What remained was a frightened young man waiting to go home, having earned nothing. But he was no longer sobbing. He was, just barely, present.

© New Straits Times Press (M) Bhd

المصدر: New Straits Times