The corporate media has found its latest villain. Following a devastating fire at an unregistered facility in Galpatha, Sri Lanka, that claimed 13 lives, the press immediately defaulted to its standard playbook: sensationalized horror, performative hand-wringing, and predictable moral condemnation.
The focal point of this collective fury is a single, harrowing detail: one of the deceased psychiatric patients had been chained to a chair. Building on this theme, you can find more in: The Night the Sky Ran Faster Than Sound.
The public reaction was swift and furious. The director was arrested for negligence. Social media erupted with demands for justice, treating the facility as a rogue house of horrors run by sadistic grifters.
This reaction is emotionally satisfying, comforting, and completely wrong. Experts at Al Jazeera have provided expertise on this situation.
By focusing entirely on the sensational optics of chains and makeshift restraints, the public conversation completely ignores the brutal systemic realities of psychiatric care in developing nations. I have spent years analyzing underfunded institutional infrastructure, and the ugly truth is that the alternative to these makeshift, "illegal" facilities is not a pristine, state-of-the-art hospital. The alternative is total abandonment, violence, or death on the street.
We need to stop pretending that bureaucracy solves chronic resource deficits. The outrage directed at this single facility is a form of collective denial that shields the state, and society itself, from their own failure to provide viable alternatives for the severely mentally ill.
The Myth of the Sadistic Caretaker
The media narrative frames the facility staff as abusers who took pleasure in torturing vulnerable people. But look at the actual testimony from the ground, stripped of the breathless headlines. Danuja Chathuranga, a staff member at the home, explained the rationale with chilling pragmatism: when left unrestrained, patients suffering from severe psychiatric disorders regularly ran away. One was recently pulled from a barbed-wire fence while carrying the chair he was tied to; another was recovered from a muddy marsh with open sores.
“Our intention was not to harm them," Chathuranga stated. "They were patients receiving psychiatric treatment. If they run away or fall into a pit, well, or get run over by a vehicle, we have to take that responsibility.”
This is the grim calculus of understaffed, low-resource mental health care. When you have two or three workers managing dozens of patients with profound, unmedicated psychosis or severe dementia, constant physical surveillance is mathematically impossible.
In a wealthy Western hospital, a patient at risk of wandering or self-harm is placed in a locked psychiatric ward, monitored by CCTV, and subdued with chemical restraints like liquid haloperidol or physical soft-restraints managed by a team of security guards.
In a makeshift facility in rural Sri Lanka, where the state provides no funding, no modern sedatives, and no secure infrastructure, the choices shrink down to a terrifying binary:
- Restrain the patient physically using whatever is on hand.
- Let them wander into traffic, drown in a well, or starve in the jungle.
Pretending that the staff chose cruelty over compassion is a lazy cop-out. They chose a crude, survivalist form of harm reduction. The chain was not an act of malice; it was a desperate, low-tech substitute for a locked door and a functional pharmaceutical supply chain.
The Hypocrisy of Government Regulation
The second major pillar of the media’s consensus is the demand for bureaucratic crackdowns. Government officials, including Chathura Mihudum, director of Sri Lanka's National Secretariat for Elders, were quick to point out that the facility was unregistered and drastically overcrowded, packing 71 residents into a space built for 15.
This defense by the state is pure political theater.
The fire-ravaged facility and its sister homes did not operate in a vacuum. The chief administrator, Amala Rajapaksa, revealed that the home regularly accepted direct patient referrals from the state's main mental hospital, the courts, and local police. Government doctors frequently visited the facility to treat the residents.
Think about the staggering hypocrisy required to maintain this stance. The state actively used this facility as a dumping ground for individuals the public system could not or would not handle. They used it to offload the societal burden of severe mental illness, fully aware that it was unregistered, overcrowded, and under-equipped.
Then, the second an electrical short circuit triggers a fire, the state suddenly discovers its regulatory conscience. They shock themselves to find that the facility they were treating as a shadow state asylum did not have the proper paperwork filed in Colombo.
Enforcing strict registration laws in an environment of total scarcity does not magically build safer facilities. It simply closes down the only shelter these patients have. If the government shuts down every unregistered, overcrowded care home tomorrow, those 71 patients do not get transferred to five-star medical centers. They end up sleeping on concrete sidewalks, left to fend for themselves in absolute squalor.
The Hidden Economic Reality of Care
The most uncomfortable truth about the Galpatha tragedy is that the facility existed because it filled a massive, desperate market demand that no one else was willing to meet.
Consider the perspective of Dolawatta Mudiyanselage Chandra Rajapaksa, a mother in her seventies who kept her 45-year-old psychiatric-patient son in one of the facilities run by the same director. "It's difficult for me to look after him, I am old... and a patient myself," she said.
This is the reality the comfortable middle class chooses to ignore. Severe mental illness destroys families financially, physically, and emotionally. When a family is living on subsistence wages, and an aging parent is physically incapable of restraining a violent or profoundly confused adult child, a facility like the one in Galpatha is their only lifeline.
The home relied on a patchwork of erratic funding: small payments from families who had minor resources, supplemented by crowdfunding campaigns on platforms like TikTok to secure basic donations of food, mattresses, and pillows. It was a fragile, hand-to-mouth operation.
When you run a care home on TikTok donations and pocket change, you cannot afford modern fire-suppression systems, industrial rewiring, or structural expansions to eliminate overcrowding. The overcrowding is a direct result of the sheer volume of desperate families begging for help, combined with a total lack of institutional funding.
+------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Public Expectation | Material Reality |
+------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Immaculate, spacious facilities | Crowded rooms funded by donations |
| Trained, 24/7 security personnel | Handful of underpaid staff members |
| Advanced chemical/soft restraints | Crude physical restraints |
| Strict bureaucratic oversight | Complicit state-sponsored referrals |
+------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
Shifting the Blame
The arrest of the facility's director on charges of criminal negligence is an easy win for the local police. It provides a scapegoat. It allows the public to vent its fury, close the chapter, and pretend the problem has been solved.
But the real negligence belongs to a society that demands the invisible removal of the mentally ill without paying for their upkeep. The negligence belongs to a state apparatus that uses illegal facilities as an overflow valve for its broken public healthcare system, only to criminalize those facilities when tragedy strikes.
Shutting down these homes, arresting their administrators, and demanding stricter licensing without providing billions in state infrastructure is a death sentence for the people currently living inside them. It ensures that the next 13 psychiatric patients who die won't perish in a care home fire. They will die quietly, individually, from exposure, starvation, or violence on the streets, far away from the cameras and the public's fleeting sense of moral outrage.
