Who will cry for orphans? A review article on orphans’ mental health

Background:  Being an orphan is a miserable feeling for children when they don’t have their family with them and to survive in this life there is no one to take care of them for their psychological health and need. Mental health is a state of an individual’s wellbeing. It helps to attain the ability to enjoy the life and with this balance can be attained in life activities and psychological resilience can be achieved. Therefore, orphan’s mental health is also an important aspect to think about. Objective: The objective of this review study is to understand the scenario of orphan’s mental health. So that some efforts for their mental health can be considered and their life can be improved which they also deserve just like other children and adolescents as orphans are also the important part of this society and should not be neglected. Methodology: Through internet, studies conducted for orphan children and adolescent’s mental health were being searched. The searched items were orphans, studies on orphans, mental health of orphans, well-being of orphans. For Research papers PubMed, Psych Info, Google Scholar were being used. Out of the searched material, we collected the relevant studies. Case study and unpublished material was not included in this article. Results: After screening around 35 research papers only those papers were being reviewed which belonged to our review purpose and for these 29 research papers were being finalized for this present review. it was being found that orphan children and adolescents are more prone to develop psychiatric illnesses. Adoption rate was found to be very low in India which is also a warning sign for orphan children’ mental health. Conclusion: Studies reported that number of orphans are increasing day by day as population is increasing in the worldwide and around 20% orphans are in India. There are very less children who lost their parents, most of them are abandoned. After reviewing various studies, it was being found that orphans were found to be having more tendency to develop psychiatric illnesses like – depression, anxiety, PTSD, behavioral problems etc.