Case Studies
5-yr old Danish starts crying whenever his mother goes for work. He constantly makes requests to his mother to not go for work and stay at home with him. When his mother is at her workplace, he calls her frequently and asks her to come back home. He complains of stomach pain or body pain and requests his mother to take leave. He has stopped attending his online classes and does not study at all. His mother shared that when she comes back home from work, he fights with her. His mother is a healthcare professional and was stationed in a hospital during the lockdown.
Danish’s mother was a para-medical professional and was on COVID-19 duty at a hospital and her son was very worried about her mother going to the hospital during lockdown. He was worried that something will happen to her mother and that is why he wanted his mother to stay at home.
16-yr old Sunita is the eldest daughter in her family. She is a very bright child and never misses school. She is also very helpful and helps her mother with home chores (does all the cleaning, cooking, and washing). She has younger siblings, but they do not help Sunita in home chores, at all.
Her mother has noticed a recent change in Sunita’s behaviour Sunita has started shouting often and beats-up her younger siblings when they do not listen to her. Sunita’s mother also noticed that Sunita is not attend her online classes regularly and if it all she does, she joins the classes late.
Due to the closure of school and lockdown, Sunita being the oldest child had to share the responsibilities of housework with her mother. Her entire day would go in doing home chores, leaving no time for her studies or leisure activities and even to rest or rebuild her energy. She would be too tired to attend her classes or finish her school assignment on time.
Further her siblings were not helping her at all in house chores, therefore she was feeling stressed out and worn out and that was the reason for her anger towards her siblings.
14-yr old Gayatri’s has been posting several messages on her WhatsApp status. Earlier, the messages were general but moved to being more about love, affection, friendship, and now, more recently, about loneliness, rejection, lack of trust, and self-harm. She seemed to be demeaning herself very often in the messages.
Gayatri became attracted to her chachi’s 19-yr old brother who was living with them during the lockdown. She started harbouring feelings of affection but soon found herself frustrated at her inability to express her feelings, and also because he took no notice of her. Her feelings of loneliness were compounded by the fact that she did not attend online classes and was completely cut off from all her friends.
17-yr old Ram has recently changed his school due to his father’s transfer. Their new house is far from the city and is quieter that the previous one. He likes it here and he likes the new school too. He shares cordial relations with his parents and siblings. He is very focused on achieving his goals and spends most of his time studying. He wants to get admission in the best business management college. Ram scored first position in his mid-term exams.
But Ram’s mother is worried about him because he has no friends and he spends most of his time at home alone either playing online games or studying.
Even after six months of relocating, he has made no friends in the community and he would reject all the invitation for participation in any of the community programs.
Ram had an experience of bullying in his previous school and no intervention was done at that time. Later, he developed social anxiety and would go to any length to avoid any kind of social interaction to avoid humiliation.
It is also important that if a person does not have any healthy and meaningful relationships in real life, it is easy to look themselves in a virtual world where they can get a false sense of belonging.
12-yr old Sita has many superficial cut marks on her left forearm. Sita shares that she sees this chudail all the time who is after her and tells her to take a knife and kill her younger brother and herself. She says that the chudail wears a white saree, has long, flowing black hair, and she has blood on her hands. Sita lives in a 1BHK apartment with her father, mother and two younger siblings. At night, they all sleep together next to each other.
Sita’s was not hallucinating. She was exhibiting attention seeking behaviour. It was a pattern with her as she did not get adequate attention at home from her parents, especially her mother.
