Abuse of psychiatry in South India

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By Ramesh Kumaran

I have been living in South India for several decades now and I can assure you that the mental health hygiene and the mental health indicators are very poor here. People here are only overzealous about physical cleanliness, which is not unimportant. But there are only 3500 psychiatrists for a population of 1.5 billion. Less than 0.05% of the GDP goes towards psychiatry, and a miniscule amount of it reaches the patient. The mental health program just does not exist. Health programs for lifestyle diseases are in full swing, but the public are misusing them by not being compliant.

The media and the general public have been projecting psychiatry patients as murderers or criminals. They do not want to alter this stereotype image of a psychiatry patient. Neither they, nor the medical community, are championing for us. To neglect the psychiatry patient is not considered to be a fault or a crime here. But if a lifestyle-diseased case is neglected it attracts severe penalty and compensation.

In India, World Mental Health Day is not observed, because Indians think that it is an illness of people who are malingering or those who are unfit to be taken seriously.

I have been abused physically and emotionally

Coming to my personal issue, I have been abused physically and emotionally. Inside the house, at the workplace, inside public transport vehicles, in shops and service centers, inside hospitals and rehabilitation centers. Practically everywhere. I have reported all these to the ministers, the court and finally the prime minister of India. Recently the 1987 mental health bill was revoked and replaced by a new one, but without any tooth and claws to help us.

The social customs, traditions and attitudes towards psychiatry and the judiciary together have socially isolated me and forced me to live alone inside a lodge. The psychotropic drugs are very expensive and so are the investigations upon developing metabolic syndromes. But all subsidies in this regard are available readily for lifestyle-diseased patients.

My impression is that South India and our country are both discriminating against us inside the health care industry. You probably must have forgotten the Erawadi tragedy, where nearly 40 psychiatry patients being treated illegally by a dargah were charred to death after a fire broke out. No one was convicted. Let one dog die on the roadside and you have the entire country howling about it. Dogs have their human rights but we don’t.

I haven’t voted for the last 10 years or had sex for 15 plus years. That’s how we are maltreated.