Jennifer’s love was stigmatised. To have fallen in love with a boy from a different caste was seen as a mistake, a crime by her family. Her family murdered her lover in front of her eyes. And that’s when her mental health started declining. In India, love has been stigmatised. And so has been mental health. So when Parvathy, ill-treated by her husband for years, started following an elephant around calling it “mama”, and singing around the town, her existence became a taboo with her mental health in shambles. For Usha, too, Love is an elephant. These three women were assisted by The Banyan and provided access to medical help and community support.
Millions of Indians navigating mental health needs simultaneously confront gender violence, caste discrimination, religious persecution, extreme poverty and other forms of marginalisation. They face compound burdens, what scholars call ‘double jeopardy’, social inequities layered atop mental health stigma. One part of stigma is the alienation of people with psychosocial disabilities from social and economic spaces. The other rests in the low priority and lack of resources, including the work needed to build better therapeutics, to advance mental health across the population.
This Independence Day, Outlook dedicates its special issue to ‘Freedom From the Stigma of Mental Illness’, in collaboration with The Banyan, an organisation that provides housing to people with mental health issues, assists them with reintegration into society, and encourages them towards independence.
Dr. Vandana Gopikumar and Vaishnavi Jayakumar, the co-founders of ‘The Banyan’, are guest-editing the issue along with Dr. Sanjeev Jain and Dr. Lakshmi Narasimhan.
The special issue is an attempt to center these aspects of mental health as an issue of freedom through testimonies that reflect the layered realities of mental health in contemporary India: of women living with serious mental illness and histories of homeless, families shattered by mob lynching, Kashmiris navigating decades of conflict, Doms engaged in historically caste-mandated professions and more.
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