Woman, 106, among the forgotten ones

NST: Lim (not her real name) is 106 years old and the oldest mental patient in the country.
She has been at the Permai Hospital since 1956 and has had no contact with her family for decades.
Chew (not her real name), 85, has been a resident since 1952 and is the longest-staying inmate.
They need full-time care because of their age and attendant illnesses.
At the forensic ward, the longest-staying patient is 74-year-old Lai (not her real name) who was admitted in January 1956.
She was convicted of causing grievous injury to another person. Lim, Lai and Chew are only three of the hundreds who are staying in mental hospitals for more than 25 years.
The long-staying patients are spread over four psychiatric institutions — Hospital Permai and Hospital Bahagia (Perak); Hospital Sentosa (Sarawak); and Hospital Bukit Padang (Sabah).
There are also more than 200 long-staying inmates at the Sungai Buloh leprosarium who have been there for more than 30 years.
Despite the fact that many have recovered, they remain at these institutions as their families have declined to accept them.
But help is on the way.
Health Minister Datuk Dr Chua Soi Lek has ordered a review of their cases with a view to possibly re-uniting them with their families.
He said it was a sad reflection of the times that family members disassociated themselves from immediate relatives who had recovered from mental illness.
"The family has totally neglected them. They passed the buck to hospital staff and left."
Dr Chua said many patients had been given a clean bill of health and were ready to rejoin society.
He said another problem hospitals faced was tracing the family of patients who had moved or had given false addresses.
The plight of mental patients forgotten by their families came to light when Sentosa Mental Hospital director Dr Abdul Kadir Abu Bakar highlighted the cases of four inmates.
Two were released last month while the others are slated to enjoy freedom as soon as the courts rule in their favour on the hospital’s recommendation.
Chang Kui Hing, 76, better known to inmates as Ong Nga, was released on Oct 5 and Lai Oi Shin, 31, eight days later.
Ong Nga, who had been at the hospital for 44 years after being accused of killing his wife in Bandar Sri Aman on Dec 24, 1961, was granted a discharge on Sept 30.
He has elected to remain at the hospital, the only home he has known for four decades. Hospital authorities have allowed him to do so.
Lai, who is mentally impaired, was committed to the hospital in 1993 for a month for planting an unwanted kiss on a 19-year-old girl. The month stretched to 12 years with freedom coming only on Oct 13.
Two other inmates expected to be released soon are a 66- year-old woman, who has been in the hospital for 44 years, and a 42-year-old man, who has been there for 16 years.
The woman was sent to the facility after being accused of poisoning her husband while the man had been accused of rape and murder.
If they had not been mentally ill and had pleaded guilty, they would have walked out of prison within 12 years, the maximum sentence for manslaughter.
Dr Chua said Hospital Bahagia, which began operations in November 1911 as the country’s first mental asylum, had more than 2,000 inmates of whom at least 25 per cent had been staying for more than 25 years.
He added the situation was the same at other mental institutions.