KANGPOKPI/IMPHAL: Life in Manipur trickles on, but behind the cloth curtains of relief camps that hold countless victims of violence and displacement, the conflict is hardening into its fourth year. For tens of thousands trapped inside, these dim, overcrowded halls have become permanent warehouses of trauma.The loss of homes, land, and livelihoods has triggered a massive psychological breakdown, with suicides spiking among displaced families.An estimated one in eight people here is now battling mental illness, according to the Manipur Commission for Protection of Child Rights (MCPCR). As a community unravels in slow motion, leaders warn of the ultimate casualty: loss of hope. “They have simply stopped doing that,” a senior official in the Imphal administration said.A health department official, discussing rising drug abuse among youth, told TOI: “We find hundreds of people from relief camps lying intoxicated on the roads. We don’t take action against them… We only try to help.”Dr RK Lenin Singh, former psychiatry head at RIMS, Imphal, has seen children cling to parents, wake from nightmares and draw burning houses on hillsides. Among the displaced, issues like PTSD, depression, anxiety and insomnia have reached a point of no return: “Unemployed young men, particularly those in their twenties and thirties” are “increasingly turning to alcohol or self-medication.”He said, “They have stopped hoping and looking forward.” Singh recalled a once-affluent young man in a relief queue, bowl in hand, asking for rice. “How can hope survive without dignity?”A girl at Mandap relief camp misses home but “likes it here”: she has friends. In the Kangpokpi hall without electric lights, daylight falls on children sitting cross-legged. Outside, curtains serve as doors. One shelter’s small Rs 20 lock draws laughter: a joke about guarding a home that no longer exists. Children play, study and grow up here, as mothers struggle to make an overcrowded space feel like home. That takes a deadly toll.Over 200 displaced Kuki people live at Mandap, with only six toilets. Veineilam, 11, from Elimphai village, attends Good Sphere School nearby while Chongneihoi, class IV, from Sambei village, studies at GN Public School. She often worked in fields after her father died. “Here, I don’t have to go to the fields,” she told TOI in halting Hindi.Khoinu, mother of four boys, said her youngest just turned three at the camp. Children play together, but privacy, study space are scarce. Sanitation problems, infections including diarrhoea persist; monsoon worsens shelters.“I have seen at least 4-5 children born inside these walls,” Khoinu said. One was Phalneivah’s. Phalneivah, 38, mother of four from Chaningpokpi, delivered youngest Tinjathang, now one-and-a-half, at the camp. She left furniture, belongings in her rented Imphal home, where her husband Khaithminang Mate ran small businesses. He’s now jobless.Her parents’ house was burnt, she says, and she saw her “uncle beaten to death before his wife and infant.” As fear and mistrust eroded her pre-violence Meitei friendships, she cannot return to her former neighbourhood. Displacement has shattered her world.Miles away, across the ethnic fault-line at Imphal’s Akampat camp, 115 displaced Meitei families mirror similar agony inside the burning tin sheds at Ideal Girls College campus.Inside, women collect water, carry utensils and work handlooms outside.Chinglensana, a young resident, says his mother and sisters found camp life more difficult than he did as a man. “It is so much harder for the women.”In her seventies, Soram Sachi has faced repeated bereavement. Her 38-year-old daughter died at the camp a year ago after a heart problem. Her son-in-law was killed in clashes at Moreh, orphaning their son.Her daughter-in-law also died in 2024, even after the family mortgaged paddy fields for treatment but couldn’t take her to Guwahati, leaving two children behind: “When we fled, everything changed. Now, we have lost family members, our home… it can never be the same again.”Amu Chou, 78, her husband, told TOI: “We know families who have lost their young children to suicide. It pains our hearts. These are children who should have been studying, playing and thinking about their future…”With Chou unable to work, their son does cleaning and daily-wage jobs. Sachi sells Rs 10 candles and incense sticks to make ends meet, as the three children grow up without mothers.