The Long-Term Mental Health Consequences of Floods and Landslides in Thrissur District, Kerala, India

Abstract

Disasters such as floods and landslides affect humans than ever before. The effects of a catastrophe on humans could result from a simple injury to life-threatening accidents and the emergence of infectious diseases. Part-1 deals with the social and political background of the study site, where I conducted the primary research for people exposed to landslides and floods in the district of Thrissur in 2018 August. For part-1, I examined the modern social and political history of India since 1850. I analyzed the published literature of disasters that reported under the British India colonial period in India. I focused on two historical calamities, a cyclone that occurred in 1864 in the state of Bengal, which killed over 40000 individuals. Secondly, I analyzed the flood that reported in the state of Kerala in 1924. In the second part of this thesis, I conducted a cross-sectional survey among people exposed to floods and landslides that occurred in the district of Thrissur, Kerala, in 2018 August. We measured the mental health morbidity, such as the prevalence of common mental disorders, factors associated with the progression of common mental disorders in the study population. In summary, the aftermaths of the colonial government tenure still impact the people of Kerala in various ways. The historical governance actions and policy practices still visible, such as deforestation, underfunded health care systems, and inadequate social responses from the government's in power, resulting in increased social suffering of people affected by the disaster. Of those individuals, the poorest of poor are being sidelined from the mainstream social-political developments happening in post-independent India and thereby increasing the structural inequality among citizens.