Shah Siamoon
Legend has it that when an ostrich senses approaching danger, it buries its head in the sand, thinking that its entire body is concealed, that if it can’t see its enemy, then the enemy also can’t see it. We humans imitate them, when we respond by blotting out a problem from the mind instead of tackling the situation which threatens us, it is called The Ostrich Effect. Now, the ostriches may be excused this irresponsible behaviour of theirs, but for us humans, the jury may not be that lenient because we live in societies of people living interdependent and interconnected lives and as such, the consequences of our actions percolate into others’ lives which is why it becomes almost criminal on our part when we refuse to acknowledge and act upon the deep rooted prevalence of issues like Mental Health Problems in our society.
The gravity of this issue can be estimated by the fact that even our legislators agreed with each other for a change and passed the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 on 7 April, 2017. To put it in a nutshell, the law aims at providing better mental healthcare and making it accessible to all. It safeguards the patient’s rights like the right to confidentiality, right to free legal aid in case of a violation, right to community living and other rights. It proposes an ‘advance medical directive’ through which individuals can dictate how they would like to be treated should they lose their mental capacity and can nominate a member who can make decisions on their behalf. It prohibits solitary confinement and lays down guidelines for treatments like electro convulsive therapy and directs the government to undertake educational and training programmes to promote mental health, to train medical officers in prisons and public healthcare establishments to provide basic mental healthcare and to establish Central & State Mental Health Authority and Mental Health Review Boards. An interesting part of the Act though is the fact that it fixes the responsibility of any person found wandering at large within the limits of a police station, whom the officer has reason to believe has mental illness and is incapable of taking care of himself, on the officer in-charge of the police station who has to take the patient under his protection. Also, the act decriminalises suicide.
But no matter how many laws we create, no matter how efficiently they’re implemented; tangible results will not be achieved unless and until the ‘stigma’ and ‘ignorance’ related to mental illnesses do not get removed. What good will a hundred new speciality centres and a thousands of mental health professionals do if the patients don’t come forward for treatment. First of all, a patient must acknowledge his/her illness and let the people responsible for his care know about it. Sometimes the patient might be too ‘ill’ to know that he/she is ill, in which case it is the duty of the family, the friends and the peers to look for the signs and take the necessary steps to get the patient treated. This process would be totally analogous to the detection and treatment of other health ailments only if all its complexities didn’t come into play as soon as it is applied to a typical Indian household. First of all, the patient is likely to be too ignorant about mental health problems to acknowledge that he/she is ill. The same would be the case with the family, the friends and the peers, who would dismiss all the symptoms as tantrums, laziness and what not. If by any miracle, both the patient and the caretakers do realize that some mental health concern is at play, they are likely to try to cover it all up as opposed to seeking help because the society that we live in has somehow managed to relate a biological problem of the brain to the social status and honour of the entire bloodline of that brain’s owner. The diagnosis of our trained medical practitioners doesn’t hold water because our ignorance and insensitivity carries out its own diagnosis which is always ‘mentally retarded’ or ‘pagal’ irrespective of whether the person is actually suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Depression or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or any other ailment.
Quite astonishingly, there is one fact that is even weirder than the stigma around mental illnesses. On the one hand, we have people going through pain day in and day out, falling into an abyss with each breath they take; who refuse to utter a single word about their illness let alone share their problems with peopleeven though it is a question of their survival and on the other hand we have people, mostly the youth, trying their best to get others to believe that they’re actually ‘depressed’ when they’re sad, that they have OCD when they simply put away their things neatly, that they are Bipolar when it’s really just a mood change. Somehow, while they became taboo for a part of the country, mental illnesses managed to become ‘trendy’ and ‘desirable’ for the rest of it. We could argue that this belittles the issues, that this steals from the gravity of mental problems but given the juncture that we are at, if there is even the slightest chance that people attributing mental illness to themselves in their everyday conversations and social media dealings in good humour will help get rid of the stigma around them, will make them more fact than fiction, will sensitise us towards them, then we might need to convince ourselves to accept even this.
Speaking at the 22nd convocation of National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru on 30 December, 2017; President Ram NathKovind also expressed his concern over the deteriorating state of the mental health scenario of the country. According to him, ‘India does not simply have a mental health challenge, it is facing a possible mental health epidemic’ and ‘the number of Indians suffering from a mental health problem is larger than the entire population of Japan’. The fact that these statements are likely to seem shocking and unbelievable to the majority of us is a proof that we have prioritized the wrong things long enough; that we have seen, felt and then ignored long enough; that we have been ostriches long enough. It’s time to take our heads out of the sand.
(Send me your feedback and comments at shahsiamoon@gmail.com)
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