I am reading this news article, and I found the paragraph below does not make sense to me.
It will reduce the stigma, the pain and the harm caused on these patients, like stigmatizing and insulting them on their predicament," he said. "Giving them over to traditional healers, where they are abandoned to themselves and left at the mercy of these healers. Where people suggest sex as a channel of healing because they consider these diseases to be spiritual or at worst they are even abandoned to the streets.
Especially, I don’t understand how the part after “he said” works.
My questions are:
- What is the function of the clause ”Giving them over to traditional healers”? Is it a participle construction? Who is the subject of it?(the families of patients?)
- what is the main clause for the clause and sentence starting with “where”? (I thought at first the “where” in this paragraph works as the one in the sentence like “There was a situation where kids didn't have access to fresh food.”, but in this article, there seems to be no main clause.)
- What does “they are abandoned to themselves” mean?
- What is your interpretation of the paragraph? How do you paraphrase/summarise the paragraph? (I interpret the paragraph as “the doctor thinks people should bring the mental illness patients to the psychiatric hospitals, not to the traditional healers because traditional healers provide the patients with unsuitable treatments such as sex and abandoning in the street”, but it seems wrong…)
