Psychosis and conditions like Schizophrenia have been tainted with pessimism right from the beginning. Doctors often don’t know that recovery is possible and can convey this fatalism to their patients. Prateeksha Sharma’s lived experience and research work challenge this pessimism. Prateeksha is a musician, researcher, composer, counselor, and writer. However, for the longest time, she was only thought of as a patient.

She is a distinguished research fellow at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research in Hyderabad and the founder of Brightside Family Counseling Center. She received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder as a college student and has managed these achievements while navigating the horrors and the gifts of psychosis. Prateeksha’s writings critically examine psychiatric systems and foreground survivor perspectives. She brings intellectual depth and personal clarity to what it means to move from being labeled a patient to being recognized as a person.

In this interview, we discuss psychiatric subjectivation, medical zombification, the silencing effects of diagnosis, and how lived experience completely reshapes the conversation about mental health.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

 

Ayurdhi Dhar: Can you tell us a little about your background, your personal lived experience?

Prateeksha Sharma: I was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder in 1992, in the final year of college. I was put on psychiatric drugs, antipsychotics, for a long time after that, notwithstanding the fact that whatever upheaval happened in the first few days was contained very quickly.

In fact, my mom told the psychiatrist that my daughter is all right now, she’s sleeping and not running helter-skelter, so why don’t you just taper it off? But he said, “No, no, no, this has to go on for a long time”. He, in fact, upped the dosage. For the next 18 years, I remained on psychiatric medication, which means life was totally compromised. The foremost identity I had was a patient.

At that time, I was studying economics and had received musical training since childhood. 18 years went by like that with the medication. Many things happened—the music kept unraveling, and there were very difficult periods when I was absolutely frozen. You have long bouts of depression—you’re absolutely immobilized, you cannot do anything for months.

Like, I remember looking at my tanpuras and thinking, “Oh my god, did I really ever tune and play this instrument?” There was no question of singing; not a sound would come out of my throat. I was so frozen in my mind that I had no words. I could sit with somebody for hours and not articulate a single idea. There were no ideas. That was zombification, how the medication, it just takes over your life completely. It’s like becoming a stone. Your mind is frozen. I couldn’t believe that it was me.

I was one of the most compliant patients you would ever encounter, so disciplined, I wouldn’t miss a dose of medicine. 18 years is not a small amount of time. All these neuroleptics, like lithium, are given to us, saying that these keep you stable, but I saw that despite lithium and whatever else you got, you did have breakdowns. So, what is happening here? I’ve seen repeatedly that whenever the stressors in life were humongous and beyond my capacity to handle, I still had breakdowns, “psychotic breakdowns”.

Then I encountered a homeopath who was recommended to me by my family. I said, “No, I don’t think homeopathy can do anything”. But out of curiosity, I spoke with him. He asked me some very strange questions, like, “Do you have any sensitivity to sound?” I said, “Yeah, if I hear loud sounds, I have a lot of heart palpitations”. When I finally went to see him, he actually sat with me for two and a half hours.

Dhar: Unlike most psychiatrists who probably spend 5 to 10 minutes, right?

Sharma: Yes. The psychiatrist will talk to you for 5 to 10 minutes. He sat with me for two and a half hours, asking every single detail, including how cold or hot I feel, my hair, skin, everything. He said in homeopathy, you must have a capacity for observation. He told me right on the phone that you’ll recover. I thought this man didn’t know how serious bipolar disorder is. I’ve been a patient for 18 years. How can I recover?

Dhar: Had you ever heard that before?

Sharma: Never, never, never. Nobody ever said I could recover.

Dhar: If you were to look back on the 18 years and think about what the psychiatric and mental health treatment stole from you, what would come to your mind?

Sharma: Ayurdhi, I think it’s a very tough question because actually it stole my life away.

Dhar: I’m sorry to hear that.

Sharma: With the knowledge that I have today, had I had this knowledge those 18 years ago that are gone now… I can’t enter into any professional field to take up a job. I could have done something in music; I could have created a life for myself.

By the time I did my PhD, my work was outside the realm of comprehension of the average person—here the world is talking about mental illness, and I’m saying that there is no mental illness, that everybody can recover. What a claim! What a direction I’m taking, opposed to the whole world. I refuse to budge from that, no matter who’s listening. The fact that people are not recovering is not because they cannot. It’s because they have no enablement in the system. It suits everybody that people remain mentally suffering to maintain the status quo in society.

Dhar: I study corruption in the pharmaceutical industry; I study bad science. It is rampant. I completely understand what you mean about it serving the status quo when people do not recover.

Sharma: How will they legitimize their power otherwise? What is the claim to saying that I’m an expert and I have the capacity to understand your suffering and ameliorate it? They don’t. They can’t. Yet they have that claim, and because they seem to be men of science, they have the legal and the social power behind them.

Dhar: Science at its heart is supposed to be open and humble. There is little openness or humility that exists in many of the Psy-disciplines.
In the foreword to your book, Amita Dhanda says that she gleaned from it that the diagnosis itself was the greatest barrier to recovery. How can diagnosis foreclose recovery in the first place?

Sharma: You walk into a clinic, and you explain you’re suffering, your pain. You didn’t go with the intention of getting a mad label. You want to have some respite from your pain. They say you have schizophrenia. Now you think, “Wow, this is something legitimate because the doctor has a name for it”, okay?

People will quickly go and check what schizophrenia is sitting there in the office itself. They go, “Oh my God, it’s such a huge thing.” Now they enter into the portals of mental illness, and the whole world tumbles upon them. You read stories, watch films. The discourse tells you how dire your situation is. You don’t want to tell somebody, “I have schizophrenia”. It silences you. That’s the first thing that happens.

This is the beginning of how you become a subject of psychiatry. You walked in as a free individual, thinking, “I will go to this man who’s an expert at understanding pain, and possibly they’ll understand mine as well”. You come out with a diagnosis so dire and damning that you’re silenced.

You can’t tell anybody about this part of you, which is so salient—identity is transformed immediately, from a person you become the patient and a patient who has also a very powerful diagnosis. The more you investigate online, the more damning it becomes. Your family will also investigate. The doctor will say, “Please be sure that your child, your spouse, or whoever remains within the bounds of medication.” Then they’ll be manageable. The family is going to become the arm of psychiatry.

Then there is shame. I’m talking of the year ’92—my behavior was considered problematic because it was too extroverted—I was going around talking to people I ordinarily wouldn’t talk to or saying things I wouldn’t have said. After coming down with your suppressing medication, your neuroleptic, you feel the shame of what you’ve done. The loss of the social face is such a huge thing.

That is the start of the stigma, the self-stigma. This disables you because anybody who cuts themselves off from the social world is going to progressively become disabled. They’re going to keep shutting themselves inside their four walls, and that’s exactly the case with every psychiatric patient.

Dhar: So, a person is given an identity that they might find temporary relief in, but it also cuts them off from the rest of the world.

Sharma: Ayurdhi, the relief is very momentary. In fact, the word I would use instead of “relief” is “recognition” of their pain.

Dhar: There is a meaning to the pain. The relief comes from the recognition that there are others like me.

Sharma: You feel it’s legitimate. Maybe my family or my loved ones cannot understand me, but this educated man, who’s a doctor, gets me.

Dhar: This process of psychiatric subjectivation starts. For example, I noticed that for you and the people you interviewed for your book, even when they were doing really badly on all their medications, they were still good patients. They didn’t seem to realize it wasn’t working. What is it about my discipline that stops people from seeing that I am much worse than how I was when I first entered a psychiatrist’s or a psychologist’s office?
When did you start suspecting that something was off with the treatment or the system itself? What don’t many others not notice?

Sharma: The average person, who includes me, is not going to question psychiatry. Why would I be compliant if I didn’t agree with it? I did have faith. I believed that this was science and that it was working in my interest. Doctors are trying to do the best they can.

In fact, in the first year of taking the medication, I had a thyroid flare-up. I had a very bad case. When we went to the doctor, he said, “Oh, well, thyroid issue is a very natural outcome of lithium, so please get your thyroid checked”. But when you gave me the medication, you never warned me of that. They stopped that lithium, and then I was given Valproate, which damaged my liver. But I thought, “I’m stable, I’m able to function in the world. I can write an article”.

This is how most people think—“Now I’m functional, and I’m able to do day-to-day life. Even if I’m getting up late, I’m still getting up. I’m going to college. I’m going to work.” They compare that basic functionality to where I had totally broken down. They’re not seeing the effects it is having on the rest of the body, the iatrogenic harm.

By the way, I never said I’m quitting medication. It was my mother’s insistence. She said, “Beta, you better—this is a good homeopath you found”. I said, I don’t need to. I was very stable in my conceptualization of who I am as a stable patient. I had that stability narrative—this is good, this is me being functional, my whole life can go like this. But my family insisted on my seeing the homeopath. She paid for the ticket! I met the doctor, and he said, “You will be okay”. I said, he doesn’t understand how serious this game is.

I was in a state of inertia, believing that now I’ve achieved stability. This is exactly what I’ve seen in many other peer clients. Some say, “No, I’m quite stable with my medication”. I totally get that they would not like to upset their apple cart. People never question what harm they are coming to.

The outside force bringing about change has to be the family or someone who’s concerned about that person and says, “No, look elsewhere or do something else because this is causing you harm.” That was my mother and my sister. They pushed me to the homeopathic doctor, who said, ” You can quit. I said, “How should I stop the medicine, taper it off”? He said, no, you stop it today. I looked at that elderly man and said, “Listen, I’ve been on this for 18 years. I haven’t missed a dose. How can you say this to me?” It was blind faith in a way. I just believed him, and I quit cold turkey.

Dhar: I mean, given how much we know about withdrawal symptoms and tapering, this is quite something.

Sharma: There was a little tapering down in the sense that I had emotional flares up, but that didn’t last very long.

Dhar: How long did it last?

Sharma: Maybe six months. But that was also a time in my life with a lot of upheaval – breaking a house, a whole family moving in together; there were three packs of dogs. I handled that turmoil and came out unscathed; everybody was unscathed. We all came out alive.

Dhar: You had support. Families can be annoying and create mayhem, but if they are doing it right, they’re also that force that provides you with grounding when everything is shaking.

Sharma: That’s why I say the role of the family is so important, especially in India. My family is very educated, which is a blessing because we are skeptical of everything, every form of knowledge that seems dominant. We have critical perspectives on everything in the world. Otherwise, if you believe that doctors know best, then there’s no questioning.

Dhar: You call psychosis a misrecognition of distress. What do you mean? And what are the consequences when we define distress as psychosis? What happens to a person?

Sharma: I have been trying to unravel my own so-called psychosis time and again. I’ve had more than one episode; the last one was in 2024, after my dad’s passing, after a lot of stress had accumulated.

When you cross a certain level of suffering, when you can’t take it anymore, there’s some kind of rupture that happens—a separation of the individual from the universal. I also think the personal and collective unconscious are connected; there is some kind of gateway that opens.

Psych professionals are not there when that psychosis is building. It’s not one problem; it’s going to be multiple things. You failed one exam, and the next thing is you have a psychotic breakdown—nobody breaks down like that. It takes a lot. They might start crying, might even attempt suicide. But the psychotic breakdown is something much more protracted.

The stressors come from multiple domains. There may be a lack of nutrition, some social component, a personal setback of a deeper nature, say a divorce or death of a loved one. These things add up slowly. The distress gets more and more congealed and burdensome for the person to handle, and there is no redress. Nobody talks about it. At no point does this person get any help.

In my case, one of the triggers was my aunt’s demise in the second year of college. I was the person who took her to the hospital in her last journey. It had a deeper personal connection for me because I saw her frothing at the mouth, and it affected me as a 19-year-old. Nobody thought that my pain was even legitimate or that it merited recognition because she was an aunt.

Dhar: You write of recovery as nonlinear, and in a Mad in America article, you talked about your father’s death and the breakdown you had after. Could you tell us a little bit about that? People often get scared that they have relapsed, that it’s over, and expect recovery to be linear.

Sharma: This house where I live used to be a beehive of activity, people coming to meet my dad, and there was so much going on. Then, when he passed away, everybody left. It’s a four-storied house, and the whole house became empty. I had come back to this place after a decade and a half, so I had no connections except for my mom and my sister. I didn’t know anyone in the community. What do we need? Meaningful connection, recognition that we matter.

This time, I did not go out and have the reactions like when I had my earlier breakdown, but I was absolutely malnourished, living alone, not eating or sleeping properly. I went deep into music. I had all kinds of ragas and musical connections going on in my head, and tanpuras playing all over the house. It was very fascinating, and it opened my mind into new realms of music. I don’t feel bad about it. It’s like the gateway of consciousness opens, and then you have to gather what you can, but that gathering happens later on.

My sister and mother said I have had a breakdown, and let’s go to see a psychiatrist. I said, “No way, I’m not a psychiatric patient. I’ve done a PhD!” This neighborhood was very noisy at that time. The noise was the one that had triggered me off so badly. I did not take the psychiatric path. I made sure that I ate properly. My sister works with cannabis oils; it grows everywhere in North India. I had cannabis oils and some homeopathic medicine. Recovery is not so straightforward that, once it is accomplished, it stays stable for the rest of your life, because life will keep unsettling you time and again. It will keep bringing those meltdowns.

Dhar: I especially appreciate you sharing how you emerged out of this breakdown through a non-psychiatric path because people need to hear that there are these options.
You mentioned you were living alone with your dogs, and we had someone write this beautiful piece for Mad in South Asia about the presence of street animals in India and the healing power of touching a cat or petting a dog. Tell me about the importance of your dogs in your recovery.

Sharma: From the beginning of my life, there have been dogs. When I lived alone, I had dogs. They didn’t let me feel lonely. I had company, like children of my own. It was very active and lively having three dogs running around. My dogs have been my biggest rehabilitation, or may I say they are the real therapists in my life. They’re so central to everything, including the fact that I cook for my dogs at home.

If I had been living alone, I would have suffered from a lack of food and nutrition, but because food was being cooked for three dogs, one human automatically got something in the process. Not that I was eating dog food, but I had to ensure that there was food in the house and a functional kitchen, that they were well fed, taken care of, and taken for walks. It brought a certain discipline.

I was responsible for somebody. They were the ones who were actually there for me, not saying anything, not asking for anything, and yet they were simply there, and that was transformative.

Dhar: To be needed and responsible is a beautiful thing. You dedicated your book to your parents and wrote that a life worth living is lived for others and peers. This counters our current cultural obsession with self-care and self-preservation alone.
You wrote that music gave expression to the anguish in you, but it also gave you an identity as a musician and an artist, not just a patient. Tell us about your journey with music and how music has helped you.

Sharma: For me, music is a form of communication. In deep mental distress, communication breaks down. If a person finds the means to communicate their pain, whether it is music, theatre, painting, sports, walks in nature, knitting or crochet, serving the elderly, anything, it’s a form of communication. It’s the self, connecting with itself. When you practice music a lot, it also becomes silent somewhere. In that silence, you’ll find yourself. The essential thing is communication.

The rupture that has happened in the psychic fabric in psychosis is the rupture in the ability to communicate meaningfully to the world outside. That rupture can be mended when someone communicates in a language in which they can express themselves without threat. That communication is meaningful to you personally, and it will become your path of recovery as long as you keep doing it.

I felt that—I am not just a patient, I’m a singer, I’m a composer, a writer, a thinker, a researcher.

Dhar: That was beautiful. I will link our audience to a beautiful performance by you. Thank you for doing this with us, for this lovely conversation, and for teaching us so much about pain and recovery, dogs and music.

 

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66 COMMENTS

  2. I was diagnosed with anxiety after I went through a break up and could not complete CA final in 2011. Out of vested interest of my family for their concern to inherit family property they colluded with the psychiatrist and my diagnosis was changed to schizophrenia. It was only to maintain control. I was 27 and i believe that a female has a right to choose a partner for themselves as soon as they turn 18 in India. It’s biological capability and has legal sanctity. Earlier the psychiatrist said that i will be well soon but then he kept on telling me that these medications are for life. That my symptoms would relapse if I don’t continue with my medication. I was given such a strong dose that my menses stopped at the age of 32. I consulted a gynaecologist regarding this after she spoke to my psychiatrist my dose was lowered. After one year my menses started again. The psychiatrist was trying to control my libido through medication and even my normal human reaction was labelled as madness. I was labelled mad, I was treated mad until I started to feel like I’m mad.

    Considering above, it may be clear for others when Prateeksha Sharma talks about getting silenced with the diagnosis of schizophrenia.

    My opinions and emotions including my suffering stopped mattering to those around me. I was molested in my family member and when i raised a voice, the offender escaped by saying that she is a psychotic case.

    In 2024 after 13 years i decided to quit the medication on my own. I started lowering my dose in a phased manner for eg taking half the potency of what was prescribed and monitoring the effect on me. I did not tell my family that i was doing that. And within 3 months i was off the medication. Now it has been around one year and three four months that I am off that medication. I feel much better and sorted than before. I’m able to socialise, think rationally and take care of others around me.

    This I could achieve with the support of my seniors with whom I worked at Ministry of Corporate Affairs. I never expressly talked about this diagnosis to anyone there because I never wanted that my normal human reactions to things and people should be labelled as psychosis. They offered understanding and gave me a very comfortable environment to work in, which built my self confidence that was trampled. They did not judge me and never threw my shortcomings in my face. Instead they guided me on how I could do things in a better manner. I learnt and I grew with them. My friends supported me as well. They invested their time in me, which I did not receive in my own family.

    I still get bullied by my family members, even those who are 16-17 years younger than me. They are made to believe that they can decide my course of life and shame me for taking my own decisions. I’m often told that I would be sent to a mental asylum if I do not give in to their wishes. Often times they have beaten me up and torn my clothes. They ask me to earn and support them while they claim that I am a psychotic case. They have tried to push me into flesh trade by sharing my pictures/videos with outsiders, taken unawares while changing clothes at home. They have shared my Apple ID password and hacked my upi. Yes the authorities do not recognise this as domestic violence while there is a clear law on this Domestic Violence Act 2005.

    I reported the issue to National Commission for Women, they rejected my complaint for being insufficient. I believe they are only formed to harass men and their families in the name of section 498A.

    I believe it is very important for a person to work. This gives them a circle outside of their family. If the perception of a family is to maintain status quo of control as Prateeksha mentioned, your mentors would help you sail through it all.

    The years I spent feeling suffocated and at times it felt like I should end my life as there is no purpose to it anymore. I believe Prateeksha has explained it well enough.

    It is humbly advised that medical fraternity should take this as a serious reflection on their practices. They are here to support not to trap an individual and be used as a catalyst in snatching away their basic human rights.

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    • Thank you @Prachi for such a loud resonance and your unyielding spirit. You are so courageous. Hats off to you. If ever you would like to connect and do something with me against psychiatric violence please feel free to look for my LinkedIn profile and connect.
      I am really touched by your determination and courage. I would not like to say things like I am sorry for what you are going through for it makes little sense, but you are truly a hero(ine if you prefer) and together we are the faces of change.
      Much warmth

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        • I’m an Indian guy and I’ve used MIA since 2013. A lot of the stuff you’ve written resonates with me. Being gaslighted and accused of being “psychotic”, “schizophrenic”, “disturbed” etc. was all done to me (I am none of those things, though when I was 20, the SSRIs I was prescribed did make me manic and delusional for a short period and that was used against me later).

          Even worse for me given that I come from a medical family myself and the parent who did all that is a surgeon (an ex-HOD in fact) in an Indian government medical college. Medical Psychiatry harassment, gaslighting and threats of wards allowed him to completely subjugate me, destroy my 20s and replace me with our ghar ki kaam wali (housemaid) who he maintained as a concubine + helper and wrote off a number of properties to later. The house I grew up in was practically turned into a sort of slum. The kaam waali’s whole family moved in and her kids were raised in my former house. This is after an entire childhood of 3rd rate behaviour (my mother didn’t make it any easier with her own behaviour). I won’t go into detail because I have 100s of posts on MIA and they can be looked up with a search.

          I’m rid of all the POSs now and I have my own place.

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          • Thank you friend. I am sorry to hear about your suffering. My own understanding and long association with the field teaches me that people who come from families with someone having a medical degree are the least likely to recover/heal because their “medically vested” family member will not let them be, these people of medicine are so cock-sure of their knowledge or that they have the final answers/solutions for every problem any human faces. It is a pity and nothing but intellectual vulgarity.

            I am afraid it is not the easiest to trace your posts on MIA, since you have not written with your name, and if you have some posts on MIA, they would all be with your actual name, isn’t it?

            I am happy for your sake that you have a home of your own. That is wonderful indeed. I wish you light and peace, further courage to improve your own and others’ lives.

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          • I don’t use my real name or show my face on any mass-access public websites on the internet. After being blackmailed and gaslighted with some really clever tactics, being brought down to near-street level for a while and knowing the kind of exploitative POSs there are out there, I don’t take that risk anymore. The trauma of all that will live with me till the day I get rigor mortis. But if you’re a bit internet savvy, you can find all my prior posts on MIA regardless. It’s really easy.

            “In the end life is all an act of letting go and moving on.”. This is very well put. It’s a bit hard to put into practice though.

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          • I understand you choose to stay anonymous. If you are not fighting psychiatry publicly, it is best to do so. I am NOT, it is my pushback against psychiatry that makes me stand my ground, with my face, my story and my critical positions all out in the front- in books, articles, interviews everything.

            It is another matter that few read my writing, which is going on for over 15 years now as the mental health landscape is very cluttered with all kinds of noises, identity assertions and representations.

            And no, I do not expect that people can put suffering behind easily, until they adopted other means, which are many (writing, music, cooking, gardening, therapy, teaching, dogs and research…are things I did). I mostly do not preach what I do not practice myself. Recovery from harm is not a one final day arrival story, it is ongoing, all encompassing and maturing all the time. Do not misconstrue my words please.

            Moreover at a younger age it was not feasible to put pain behind even for me. But now, I am not young any more, and with time, a good amount of inner and outer work I am calm, at peace, relatively unruffled.

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          • I said I’ve been here for a long time. You can find my comments on a 2021 article by Yulia Mikhailova. A truly amazing article. Unfortunately, I don’t think her dream was ever realised and probably will not be any time soon.

            Also, another amazing comment on that article was by johndoe:

            Dear Yulia, if I can be brutally honest (you’re Russian, you’re probably used to it) there’s one thing you ignore in your otherwise great article, something which will stifle any attempts to bring about change in psychiatry until it is confronted explicitly.

            Let’s say tomorrow the whole world accepts the evidence that ‘mental illness’ is not a ‘chemical imbalance’, and that genetics or epigenetics play no substantial part in it — what next? If it is not a chemical imbalance, then what is it?

            Because although ‘mental illness’ may be a very questionable construct, there is something real there: the psychological distress is real.

            So we start doing some honest research and we soon start finding out that ‘mental illness’ is the result of ‘trauma’, in a wide sense of the word. And where there is trauma there must be an agent of trauma.

            And that is the real problem.

            It is fine if we can shift the blame on abstractions like ‘poverty’, ‘inequality’, ‘discrimination’, ‘racism’, etc. but that just won’t do — we need to get more specific to actually help people.

            And when we get specific we find out that the agents of trauma are for the most part the families and immediate communities (schools, etc.) of the ‘mentally ill’. And that family may turn out to be you — and nobody likes to find out we may be at least partially responsible for the distress of the ones we love.

            And so psychiatry gets away with it because they fulfill an important social role: they tidy away the evidence of our own crimes, so we don’t have to face our own guilt. They sweep things under the carpet so we don’t have to be disturbed by the consequences of our own misdeeds.

            That’s why critics of psychiatry never get very far, because at some point the people following the argument with a degree of sympathy will start realizing, even if only intuitively, that the argument ends up pointing the finger at them, and that’s where the sympathy ends.

            If my son is mentally ill because he was born that way, I get the sympathy of the world; if my son is mentally ill because I made him that way through my own failings, well, that’s a very different story.

            Better for him to be locked up and silenced with drugs than for him to expose my own guilt to an unforgiving world.

            We can’t make any progress until we look this in the face, and interventions that are genuinely effective like Open Dialogue address the fact that we are not dealing with mentally ill individuals, but with mentally ill families and communities and — ultimately — mentally ill societies.

            You can’t start pulling the thread of psychiatry’s lies without a lot of other lies unravelling.

            It’s easy to get people to protest real or perceived police brutality because most people are not policemen. You may get people to protest against Big Pharma because most people do not work for Big Pharma (although probably more than you imagine do, directly or indirectly), but can you get people to protest against agents of psychological trauma when most of us are in fact agents of psychological trauma?

            We would be protesting against ourselves.

            Wasn’t Tolstoy who said that it is far easier to try to change the world than to try to change ourselves, or words to that effect?

            This is not to say that I don’t think the work of people trying to expose the corruption of Big Pharma or fighting bad science with good science isn’t important. I think it is extremely important and often heroic.
            ᅟ
            But it will not be enough if we don’t start looking at our own personal culpabilities.
            ㅤ
            Ultimately, true change will not come about through science or politics, but through something that it is best expressed in the language of religion, through repentance and conversion.

            The thing that saddens me is this. All these years of argumentation and dissecting Psychiatry on MIA. Hundreds of comments on multiple articles since 2013, along with a whole YouTube channel (amongst other things) that deals with just this with many discussions with psychiatry guys from other countries. I might have more knowledge about some aspects of Psychiatry than many MD (Psychiatry) and MSc (Psychology) students and doctors in India (and other countries) and it makes no difference at all. Even in 2025, my mother’s husband was still calling me the same derogatory psychiatric slurs.

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        • It’s also amazing to know that there are still people in India like the ones you found at the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. And not revealing this Psychiatry balderdash to people, no matter how many psychiatry graduates say that it’s okay to do so because they want to make their own profession seem more acceptable is a good thing (they’re not the ones who are going to be gaslighted).

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          • Much support to you dear. Yes, i believe it’s hoping against hope that worked. My prayers got manifested. Like it is highlighted in Shashank Redemption the movie ‘Hope is a good thing’

            It is about a prison break and my god what is a worse prison than a home that robs you of everything, especially your youth your time. In the end life is all an act of letting go and moving on.

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          • Another thing I fear in India (and other developing countries) is rules and enforcement regarding several medical and legal aspects tightening and becoming just like North America and Europe. Right now, there’s some wiggle room that allows you some degree of independence where you can exercise your choice and will. We also don’t have nationwide EHR where this DSM dirt (which was sometimes entered into people’s hospital records against their will and sometimes even due to the mania/psychosis inducing effects of the very drugs they were prescribed, when it’s not an issue they inherently had at all) follows them around everywhere affecting how even standard physical medical doctors see them.

            Once it becomes exactly like other countries (and it’s getting there more by the day), some of the people who end up as patients in psychiatry will be truly doomed. Completely and utterly under the mercy and charity of medicos and abusive families (if the abusive family is a medical family itself, that’ll be the end of that person). They’ll be able to use psychiatry to control every aspect of their life, drug and DSM label them into perfect compliance even if the behaviour of the family is abusive, irrational and filled with gaslighting.

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  5. “Dhar: To be needed and responsible is a beautiful thing. You dedicated your book to your parents and wrote that a life worth living is lived for others and peers. This counters our current cultural obsession with self-care and self-preservation alone.”
    Thank you for this! This is a great topic!

    Is Sharma’s book available in the U.S.?

    Recently I have been thinking about what makes my life worth living as well. You are right that self care is not all of it. But I do think that self care is an important component. Living for my family and my communities is another important component for me. It is a matter of balancing the two main components.

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    • Thanks for your interest in my book @Gracezw. Yes it is available and possibly also in a paperback version.
      I agree self care is important but too much self care becomes indulgence and leads to indolence. I am somewhat hardy by temperament and I do many physical things- tending to dogs, birds, counseling support to peers, singing/teaching etc. the physical bit in my life is not insignificant and that is what I mean by “living for others”. Looking beyond yourself brings responsibility, discipline and accountability even if no one is demanding it. My plants will not ask to be watered but whether I will water them before they perish is a matter of my discipline and self-accountability.”

      I agree with you Ayurdhi picked up some interesting and different topics to talk about. I also enjoyed talking to her, when I did. Thanks again

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  6. I’ve written quite a bit on Peter Goertz’s channel goertzpsychiatry. He’s an American psychiatry guy. One of my comments on this video was this:

    “Peter Goertz, the “family history” concept in your profession can be INCREDIBLY cancerous beyond belief. There are parents who tell their children or tell OTHERS about their children (whose behaviour they do not agree with) that they have “bad genes” or “genetic problems” because their aunt went to a psychiatric ward or someone in their family had a “history of mental illness” (without actually knowing the actual descriptive history) or because their child calls them out on rubbish behaviour or stays away from them or their ecosystem of people. How horrible is it for a kid to first be maltreated by their own flesh and blood and then also be told their response (feeling low or not wanting to be around that person) is due to “bad genes”. The child cannot disprove that he has bad genes. And if such a maltreating parent is in a healthcare or biology related profession themselves, it’s even worse. Your Psychiatry profession has brought this into the lives of children.

    All these news/website articles, videos, programmes and reports which talk about the “genetics of mental illness”, shows like the Charlie Rose Brain Series, “the neurobiology of X disorder” etc. add fuel to the fire. Though, you as an individual are not personally responsible, you are still a practicing psychiatrist somewhere in the world. So, is there anything you have to say about that? All doctors during their training also do psychiatry rotations (even if they don’t become psychiatrists later). Shouldn’t the topic of medical Psychiatry related gaslighting and harassment be in medical colleges/schools in all countries during those psychiatry rotations? I’d like them to be introduced in all medical colleges in my country (India) and the world. Because medical Psychiatry gaslighting and medical Psychiatry harassment (using psychiatric terms as slurs or to gaslight, threats of wards etc.) is a real thing. It’s probably even more dangerous in medical families. I know there are more such people across various countries because people write articles on Mad in America about parents blaming each other for passing on “bipolar genes” or “borderline genes” to their children (while the children might actually psychology suffer due to that exact behaviour). It’s utterly disgusting.
    ‎
    A child first feels like crap due to someone’s behaviour and then that feeling bad is ascribed to genetics. It’s sheer gaslighting so that the culprit has to take no personal responsibility. To me, teaching all future healthcare providers about the weaponisation of psychiatry, its language, its family history concepts and its institutionalisation practices in an ill-intended way is as important as teaching them what various sorts of psychological and social issues are. After all, even that is a social issue that can cause serious psychological distress and ruin lives, careers and reputations. One person in a family ending up in Psychiatry can ruin the reputation of others in the family as being from a family of “mad people” or it can make them medically vulnerable in terms of having a “family history of mental illness”.
    ‎
    ‎In a profession where “family histories” can also partially be iatrogenically created from drug induced effects (like psychiatric drugs causing manic episodes and psychosis in leading to people being categorised as “bipolar”), the family history concept is even more dangerous. Family members of people who end up in Psychiatry also make friendships with Psychiatry graduates and recommend those psychiatrists to others in the family. Those new people who go to the same psychiatry graduate (or even the same department/hospital) have a pre-existing “family history” from the old members going there. Depending on the case, the link there might have more to do with the social relationship than genetics. Again, because of this, the whole family history concept can be disastrous affecting families negatively down generations. The more disease-mongering variants amongst psychiatrists will ignore the fact that someone has 4 aunts and 3 uncles with no history of mental illness and correlate everything with that 1 uncle or aunt who does.
    ‎
    As an extra: you’re the only psychiatry guy I’ve found yet with a personal channel who has even made a video titled “Are Psychiatric Diagnoses Helpful or Harmful?” acknowleding the serious downsides of psychiatric categorisations. Plus points to you for that, because it takes integrity. In my country, they all make videos on “What is schizophrenia? – signs and symptoms”, they write tweets “OCD is a real mental illness, learn to recognise it”, “What is Borderline Personality Disorder?”. They do it in every bloody language: English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bangla, Malayalam etc. Not a single video about the negative impact of psychiatric categorisations. Not one. Well, when American Psychiatry guys don’t do it, people in a much poorer and less educated (for now) country like India, it’s probably just over-expectation on my part. But hey, maybe someone will read one of my comments on here and think of it. I do remember an American Psychiatry guy writing a blogpost (over a decade ago, can’t find it now) about how he could not understand it when people complained that psychiatric diagnoses are harmful. The comment section of that very blogpost had people mocking others using psychiatric terminology. How foolish can you get.”

    I want to repeat again: the topic of medical Psychiatry harassment and gaslighting should be introduced in all medical colleges in India (and abroad also). I am not going to be the last victim of it, I’m sure of that. In fact, it’s probably going to increase even more now.

    I’ve written more on an Indian medical YouTube channel. I have to be a bit more careful on the Indian ones. Long comments written in fluent English (most doctors are not people who come from backgrounds where they’re fluent at writing the language and vernacular Indians often resent/envy English fluent ones), especially regarding Psychiatry, can create unnecessary issues.

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    • There’s a doctor Pranjal Rathi who quit medical Psychiatry and took up dermatology instead. I wrote a rather large post (which can be seen if you sort comments by Newest First) which ended with “Thank you Dr Pranjal Rathi for permanently dumping medical Psychiatry and taking Dermatology. I am happy that you left medical Psychiatry, even if it weren’t for the reasons I had hoped. I wish you the best in your career in Dermatology. As a dermatologist (with former experience in Psychiatry), you’re still a doctor, still have the power to prescribe whatever you want, and maybe you can help some people escape Psychiatry (and psychology and the whole mental health industry basically) and permanently stay out of it.

      I doubt that post has been read by anyone because of its sheer size but whatever.

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  7. The day is not far when a few Indian non-psychiatry standard physical medicine doctors (general surgeons, nephrologists, general physicians etc.) get caught up in this psychiatry hoopla and it damages their careers. They’ll realise what it’s like (and has always been like) for common people only when they end up entering through the client side.

    I was very happy to hear of the case of Oregon emergency medicine doctor Susan Haney. I wasn’t happy about what she went through, but what she later did. She was a doctor who suffered from depression and asthma herself. In around 2013-2014, after a 10 year battle to keep her medical license, she finally ended up suing her psychiatrist Howard Sampley for branding her “bipolar” due to prednisone induced mania.

    “Oregon doctor Susan Haney is suing psychiatrist Howard Sampley, alleging that he mistook effects of medication, and pregnancy, for a mental disorder. Haney’s trip to the emergency room for asthma and pain from a burn had resulted in a diagnosis of psychosis, bipolar disorder, mania, potential harm to self and others, and a suspension of her medical practice. The state medical board later reinstated Haney without restrictions; she is suing for for $2.25 million.

    Prednisone is an steroid used to treat asthma. One of its side effects in some people is mania. Drug induced mania can make a person feel euphoric and powerful and if not arrested in its tracks can ascend into full blown delusions where a person may behave ridiculously: saying, writing or doing things they would not do otherwise. When that happens, psychiatry graduates conveniently rebrand those people as “bipolar” and even inform it to families. If a person comes from an ill-intended family, they’ll be gaslighted into actual madness with accusations of being “psychotic”, future threats of wards, false allegations placed on them etc.

    Drug induced mania is a side effect of mania psychiatric drugs including SSRIs, SNRIs, stimulants etc. And branding people as “bipolar” due to this is rampant even in Indian Psychiatry departments. This practice has to stop. The original problems with which people end up in psychiatry departments (depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms etc.) are bad enough without such a serious “diagnosis” also being applied onto them. Medical Psychiatry isn’t even a completely voluntary profession and children admitted into psychiatry departments are as young as 4 years of age.

    Every person branded “bipolar” this way is considered a “family history of bipolar disorder” to all their family members also, increasing their risk of being “diagnosed” similarly in the future, with future psychiatry graduates having no idea that the previous ones “diagnosed” their relative that way for drug induced effects.

    I have had multiple surgical procedures, all sorts of tests and been to physical medicine doctors for various issues. None of my experiences were anything close to what I experienced directly or indirectly as a result of Psychiatry. It was childhood altering, life altering and it brought an enormous amount of mental torture into my life.

    Human error is possible in any profession. I’m not the sort of person to hold a doctor’s throat for simple mistakes. But the crap in Psychiatry isn’t “human error”. It’s how the profession is. It’s the most weaponisable profession in medicine because it’s not really a branch of medicine. It’s a branch of the law and police inside medicine and in some ways even more dangerous long term than either field.

    Even if individual psychiatry graduates are good, there are others in society who always weaponise this profession and its concepts. Just like Prachi Jain mentioning how her family members insinuate she is “psychotic” and threaten her with psychiatric wards. Medical Psychiatry guys have not much to say on medical Psychiatry harassment from people at all.

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    • I know many (Indian) doctors who have been given different diagnoses, and more often than not they quite believe their diagnoses. Some remain compliant patients for years and spread the “awareness” it is okay to take medications! And some who are a little skeptical move away from medication. And yes, just like you some also come from families professionally vested in medicine, end up being gaslighted as well. Sad and a grim reality of family politics and power games.

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      • I’d just like to add this: in my view, in certain ways, psychiatric pseudo-“diagnoses” like “bipolar disorder”, “borderline personality disorder”, “schizoaffective disorder” etc. are FAR more dangerous than drugs.

        A drug is a drug. You ingest it, it makes you feel a certain way. Nicotine is a drug, Alcohol is a drug, Sertraline is a drug, Valproate is a drug. Different drugs with different effects on your body and cognition. No drug has ever taken itself or forced itself upon someone. The danger with these drugs is sometimes less with the drugs themselves than the middlemen needed to procure them and both those middlemen and families also use a person’s dependence on them to control them. I understand why those middlemen are there but I also know their danger.

        Once a person is on “meds” and their body and mind is dependent on them, the people you get them from can use it to control you in ways that go against your well-being and benefit them.

        If you remove the middlemen from the picture, keeping aside cases of permanent damage, usually, a person can taper off meds. He can switch meds. But these “diagnoses”? People internalise them. They view their lives through their prism. Some of them defend their “diagnoses” to death. They start viewing others through those lenses. They are very often used as slurs and instruments of gaslighting or to shut people up. They are entered into medical records, on many occasions against people’s protests (and every psychiatry graduate who forcibly brands people against their will knows very well what they are doing; psychiatry departments come up with incredibly manipulative and clever ways to protect their students and peers from culpability when they do this; which can include victim-blaming). The truths of a person’s life and the actual incidents that happened in them inevitably end up getting robbed away, no matter how carefully a “diagnosis” is applied. Aspersions can always be cast on a person’s sanity by saying “he is schizophrenic”, “she is bipolar” and they become a foundation stone to put even more false allegations on a person.

        Dr Susan Haney, an emergency medicine doctor, realised first hand the effects of psychiatric “diagnoses” and the assessment of a psychiatry graduate and what it can do to a person’s life and career. There are many many people in the world (and in our country India) who can do nothing about it. They are screwed by psychiatry graduates, families and some in society also. They just live with the gaslighting, suspicion, invalidation and insults that come hand-in-hand with these “diagnoses” or the fact that someone stayed in a psychiatry department in their youth when they were already distressed from someone’s behaviour, their family gave them no other choice except to do that and that very fact again was used by the original perpetrators to call them “mad”, “psychotic” and “mental hospital people”.

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        • I very much agree. The “diagnoses” provide justification for blaming the victim and forcing “treatment” on the unsuspecting, directly or indirectly. The amount of coercion based on these “diagnoses” is substantial, they are used in court to justify forced incarceration or removal or custody of children, and children themselves are robbed of their ability to protest to maltreatment by having their anger, anxiety, or depression reframed as a “chemical imbalance” or some sort of deficiency in themselves rather than the consequence of the environment they are forced to navigate.

          If we got to eliminate either “diagnoses” or the drugs, I’d be foursquare behind ditching the “diagnoses” completely.

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          • I faced similar situation. Everytime I started to feel positive, my elder sister would say to the psychiatrist that I become negative too soon. What she never told the doctor was her own behaviour, the fact that she would leave her new born baby for me to baby sit from 2015 till 2022. What she forgot was that a baby is not capable of defending herself from a ‘patient’ who she recommended as fit to be sent to a mental asylum

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          • Pretty much. There are people who find psychiatric categorsations helpful. That’s their choice. Others should be able to opt out COMPLETELY from them.

            It is perfectly possible to descriptively describe a person’s issues (even if that person is completely psychotic and literally eating fecal matter off the streets) with no requirement for DSM/ICD behavioural categorisations. This stuff is used in family courts and other places as a foundation stone to put so many other false allegations or to cast nonsensical aspersions on a person’s sanity (who may of course, have had some form of suffering, but people can just add as much additional nonsense as they want) that it ends up doing the exact opposite of “helping a person’s mental health”.

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        • And these “diagnoses” don’t affect one person. Every person categorised with a psychiatric pseudo-diagnosis is considered a “family history” to their other family members.

          First-degree relatives: mother, father, brother, sister, son, daughter

          Second-degree relatives: grandfather, grandmother, grandson, granddaughter, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, half-brother, half-sister.

          When a family finds a psychiatry department or a psychiatry graduate useful in managing the issues of one family member (say 1 child out of their 7 children), they form social relationships with the members of those departments and start sending future family members there (other children or grandchildren). These ignoramus heads of families have NO IDEA of the internal concepts of psychiatry or what sort of a life they’re sentencing their descendants to by sending them to psychiatry departments, especially as in-patients. Their only thinking is “I’m having trouble with this person’s behaviour and I need a solution to this issue right now”. There might be other solutions possible (divorce from a troubling person, financial assistance, moving away) but their self-interests may not align with that.

          These heads of families end up dying out at age 75-80 or whatever but the family members they ended up sending to psychiatry departments have to live with the consequences of that for the remainder of their lifespan. Even THEIR children might have to pay the price for it.

          Sometimes, it’s the children who ended up marrying into the most abusive families who end up getting sent there and it’s the children borne of those marriages that again end up there. Any previous family members are considered a “family history” to the new family members. The more disease-mongering variants of psychiatry graduates will ignore that someone has 2 aunts and 3 uncles with no history of any psychological/social issues and correlate everything with 1 that does.

          Of course, if there is no family history at all and the original patient (patient zero) has adopted a child from an orphanage, some other reason gets used for why psychiatric treatment is a good option for that child and that child will later be considered a “family history” to their future relatives.

          It’s abhorrent and even worse in a profession where they categorise people with diagnoses for drug induced effects like their own damn drugs causing mania and psychosis in people whose original issues may have been something else.

          I literally grew up being told I have “genetic problems” and would get derogatorily called a “schizophrenic” by my mother’s husband (despite it not being a “diagnosis” I have ever received, nor do I have any “symptoms” related to the categorisation). Not a single doctor can do a single test and prove that there’s anything wrong with my genes. The guy was a surgeon and simply misused his medical power and got away with it.

          These people cannot take responsibility for their own shitty behaviour and medical Psychiatry concepts provide them an easy way out. Though I understand that behaviour has correlations with biology, sometimes, all this becomes is becoming punishing other family members for the sins of one person.

          Medical Psychiatry can end bloodlines and wipe out family names. One person ending up in Psychiatry in a family can make future family members the victims of medical Psychiatry harassment and gaslighting.

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      • The other thing is this: what even IS something like “bipolar disorder”? While depression and mania themselves are real (and they occur in different people for different reasons), is there a unified condition called “bipolar disorder” that is so constantly bandied about in the media?

        There are people who have only had manic episodes (for whatever reason) who are branded that way. There are people who have had only depression who are branded that way. There are people who have suffered from only depression but SSRIs made them manic who are branded that way (many of these people have never had a manic episode before psychiatric drugs). There are people for whom a “mood stabiliser” worked better than an “antidepressant” so they are branded that way. In Psychiatry they have cooked up schemes like Akiskal’s schema of bipolar subtypes where they have differentiated the damn thing into even finer categories like bipolar 1,1.5,2,2.5,3,3.5 etc. So, there really is no “bipolar disorder” as a specific entity. It’s a loose term for various things (like all other psychiatric categorisations) and that term can have disastrous consequences.

        I can’t understand how the world perceives these things as intellectual debates for students in medical colleges when these terms literally ruin people’s lives. How many more cases do we have to see? You can find clear cut cases in law where a family member might fraudulently accuse another family member they know was branded as “bipolar” as having a “serious psychotic disorder” even if that’s not the case and the family member was branded that way against his will, despite protests, due to SSRI induced mania. Such a clever family member can cleverly gaslight his/her victim and subjugate them by claiming they are “psychotic” and not to be believed.

        We should really be seeing more lawsuits, more pushback, more psychiatry graduates admitting harm and undoing it. One emergency medicine doctor suing a psychiatrist is not enough. We really need to find more standard medicine doctors themselves who are damaged by this stuff to take up the mantle of fighting against this menace.

        Psychiatry, especially in America, did a great job of convincing their common public that anyone who speaks out against the damaging practices of Psychiatry is a scientologist. I have talked to many people from North America and Europe and I quite enjoy talking to people from these countries. However, I have also come across many from these places who will straight up go to “you should pray to Xenu” or “you’d have made a great scientologist” when the sort of problems raised by people on Mad in America are brought up (I have experienced this myself, just as recently as 3-May-26). These are very real problems and most people who bring them up are NOT scientologists nor are they anti-vaccine denialists nor any of it. There’s barely any Scientology outside America (though it exists in niche pockets) and people still face these problems.

        Another note to standard medicine medical doctors (anywhere in the world, but especially in India): if you see a person categorised as “bipolar” or “borderline”, don’t automatically make up assumptions about that person without knowing their individual life and medical history. Just because Naveen who is “diagnosed” as “bipolar” behaves senselessly, that does NOT mean the same is the case with Akash simply because he has the same psychiatric pseudo-diagnosis. They are two different people with completely different life histories and two people can be branded with the same psychiatric “diagnosis” for 10 or more different reasons. Please don’t let this crap damage standard physical medical care when a person really has a serious physical ailment. The person you think is “insane” might actually be a completely traumatised person, already damaged from maltreatment in his/her personal life and subsequently made even worse by medical Psychiatry (even if it wasn’t the intention of Psychiatry graduates) because any “diagnoses” they received in Psychiatry were used against them to gaslight them, put false allegations on them and subjugate them.

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        • There was also a huge surge in “childhood bipolar disorder” in the late 90s and early 2000s. Interestingly, very few of those so “diagnosed” ended up with “adult bipolar” as a “diagnosis” later in life. The whole concept was an invention by that asshat, Joseph Biedermann, and made billions for the insurance industry before being shown to be utterly bogus. But even though it WAS shown to be and the number of “diagnoses” dropped after that, it’s still happening to this day. Science? I don’t think so!

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        • I completely understand what you are going through. Most people are busy judging others because it’s convenient for them, as they do not have to invest their time in knowing the other person. Even psychiatrists, inspite of being paid by us, don’t give enough time to know our life history and social circle. Offcourse, they need lifelong client base.

          What most people fail to understand is that when basic rights of a person or animal are annihilated, it results into hysteria. Dog bites are infamous, Right? Our government and Judiciary are hopeless in providing any relief. Rather, they support those who have a social standing by virtue of marriage or academic achievements. Not to forget the bank balance, it’s an inclusive list of the privileged class.

          Depression comes when it dawns upon us that, it is pointless to talk about or to explain our side of the story because nobody is interested in ‘listening’. This is so because even before the hell broke loose, our case had been created and decided.

          Secondly, ‘listening’ involves understanding what’s not being said directly and reading between the lines. Most people lack this skill, because they are so arrogant and engrossed in enjoying the glory of their laurels that they do not consider this as necessary.

          This however does not mean that the less privileged class like us do not have any rights. What we do have in our hands is to create and collect evidence- pictures, recordings and documented proofs. This we can do easily because our unsuspecting offenders TRUST us not to be knowing better. Let your depression and mania be your sword. Turn your negatives into positives!

          Do not let anyone push you into an institution that you do not wish to opt for. What comes easy is never valued.

          Yes, I may sound negative. But isn’t that what has been filled into our cup all our lives. I’m just pouring that out now. It’s time to give them a taste of their own medicine. We as adults, are empowered to take our own decisions. Nobody can expect a person with mental health issue to earn and to participate in sharing responsibilities. Use your mania depression and personality disorder as an excuse for not doing things their way. They are evidently more capable than us, then let them face their talent and manage everything themselves.

          Take things on face value. Each one to their own. Be an impossible for everyone and spare no one! That’s the only how others will come to an understanding that you are to be treated with Respect.

          No one respects a snake without venom.

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      • In just the last 60 days, these are several Indian doctors who’ve taken themselves out of existence:

        i.) Dr ANM. First-year Radiology resident, Grant Medical College & JJ Hospital, Mumbai. Allegedly died by suicide by hanging in hostel room. Reports consistently state he was under mental stress/depression and receiving psychiatric treatment.

        ii.) 35 year old MBBS woman doctor in Varanasi preparing for NEET PG. Allegedly died by suicide by hanging at Shivam Complex, Lanka area, on 12 May 2026. No suicide note recovered. Family suspected exam/study stress.

        iii.) 28-year old MD Psychiatry student in Agra. Found dead in hostel room under suspicious circumstances. Police said she had mental distress, was under treatment, and had reportedly attempted overdose earlier.

        iv.) 36-year old dental surgeon in Faridabad. Police reports state he allegedly jumped into the Agra Canal after an argument while returning with family. Body recovered after ~20-hour SDRF search

        v.) 23-year old MBBS graduate in Hyderabad. Reported as alleged suicide by hanging after family dispute involving keeping a pet cat.

        vi.) 31-year-old anaesthesiologist in Chennai. Reported as alleged suicide amid prolonged family opposition to relationship/marriage choice.

        vii.) First-year General Surgery PG student. Osmania General Hospital resident in Hyderabad. Reported as found dead in hostel room; early reports described it as suspected suicide linked to stress/mental fatigue.

        viii.) MS Ophthalmology PG medico in Dehradun. Found dead inside parked car; family alleged harassment by HoD.
        —
        This list isn’t exhaustive. Just examples. So many of these people are mentally screwed up themselves. In Apr-25 an Indian general surgeon gave his 28-year old dermatologist wife propofol and took her out of existence. In Jul-25 an Indian pediatrician practicing in Oklahoma drowned her 4-year old daughter.

        In my case, all throughout my childhood and youth, my mother’s husband would put such horrific false allegations on me in order to cover up his own behaviour. Think of all the crimes a human being can commit. He’d put false allegations on me of all those. And he’d say “he did it, he did it!” in public. He’d come up with different stories to tell to different people about me. He’d say something incredibly insulting, and when I’d say something in return to defend myself, it would become a story to one set of his acquaintances about me having assaulted him with some object. When I’d escape the guy and go to my maternal family, it would be him going to his family and telling them how my mother has poisoned my brain against him. His idiotic family members would come and tell my mother “he cried so much for his son”. In private, it would be “I am a dangerous defender, I can go to any extent to protect my interests” etc. Not to mention, telling me I have bad genes, calling me “pre-schizophrenic”, “schizophrenic” etc.

        During my teenage, when I’d try to stay the hell away from him and his entire bootlicking ecosystem of people, he’d constantly harass and gaslight me about having “social phobia”. We’d go out somewhere, he’d shut his mouth for two days and the “social phobia”, “social phobia” gaslighting and harassment would start again. It just wouldn’t stop. It continued even in the brief interactions during my 20s. The whole thing ultimately ended up with me being replaced with the very housemaid of my house and I would have ended up dead or on the streets if it weren’t for my maternal family, but then again, they were the ones with the Psychiatry obsession. Can’t do anything about the son-in-law, do not want to go through the trouble of divorce, send the kid for “counselling”. And sure, anyone who grows up in this crap will have some “symptoms”. But dealing with the “symptoms” instead of clearing up the source of issues is just compounding problems.

        These sorts of people need mental health treatment themselves but their victims end up in Psychiatry. They might “save” people in their professional lives with their medical-surgical skill, but my God, they can be a complete and utter cancer to live with for the immediate people around them.

        Not to mention my mother’s inability to understand any of the guy’s tactics and her chronic hoarding in the house for which ALSO I’d be attacked.

        It was insanely torturous.

        For many people in India, doctors are gods. Obviously it’s not that all people who become doctors are bad, but even in the cases where they behave horribly with someone else and victimise them, there are always people who back them up through thick and thin because they need them. It’s a funny world.

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  8. I want to leave another comment posted by a user with userid luciachanger6505 on this video:

    “My diagnosis is BPD and I hate that my psychiatrists have diagnosed me with this illness. I think psychiatrists have made up this illness, well they made them all up to label us! I don’t identify with any of the symptoms at all, but when I say this, im dismissed. I never tell anyone my diagnosis, because saying you have a personality disorder is a horrible thing to say. There is nothing wrong with my personality, im just a person who has suffered a lot of trauma in life along with neglect in childhood and has responded to that and worked through it the best I can. I don’t need this awful label, its a really cruel thing to say about someone. I wish that the label of personality disorder had never been invented by psychiatrists.”

    “so true, for example when I go to the doctors with physical symptoms I’m not believed because I have been told that if someone has BPD they lie! Of course I lie sometimes, I’m a human being we all lie. But I don’t lie all the time about everything. Because of my diagnosis when I lie it’s because I’m mentally ill, not because I’m a human being trying to protect myself by lying. If it was someone who didn’t have a diagnosis it would just be seen as normal. In fact I lie a lot less than my friends who always lie to make excuses about where they are or what they are doing because they don’t want to go somewhere with someone. I tell the truth and say I don’t want to go because I don’t think it’s something I want to do. They think I’m weird cause I don’t make up a white lie as an excuse. Every move I make is put down to me being mentally ill. Even normal stuff for everyone else in the world! It’s easy to make someone sound worse than they are so the psychiatrists have a job!

    This is what these so-called “diagnoses” (which aren’t even really diagnoses in terms of being explanations to problems) in Psychiatry do to people.

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  9. The Medical Council of India needs to introduce a section on Medical Psychiatry Harassment or Mental Health Harassment in medical colleges for all students starting at the undergraduate level. Courts should recognise Medical Psychiatry Harassment or Mental Health Harassment from families (or any others) on par with sexual harassment and physical harassment. It is no less painful and damaging. It can drive a person insane, turn him/her into an aggressive freak and cause permanent career, reputational, medical, social, psychological and marital damage. Perpetrators should receive relevant punishment or provide relevant compensation to the victims.

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  11. I’ve also noticed that the client-to-professional pipeline is very big in the mental health industry the world over.

    Many people who were formerly clientele end up becoming psychologists, social workers, peer workers etc. because they were so traumatised by the system or what their families did to them that they want to “reform the system”. The other thing that happens is that they keep getting told “you are not a doctor or a healthcare professional”, “you don’t understand” etc. over and over again so they just end up doing degrees in the damn profession so that they finally get to have some say over their own life. Others just directly call them “mental”, “crack”, “psycho”, “you sound schizophrenic” etc. as slurs when they do something the opposite party does not agree with. It doesn’t have to be something irrational or wrong. Just something the opposite party does not agree with, cannot prove wrong or when a person shows them the irrationality of their own thinking. Also, their ordinary education ends up getting affected due to whatever they go through and their “education” ends up being about learning all the nuances of Psychiatry and the mental health field to protect themselves from the system, their families etc.

    It’s really abhorrent.

    There was a Psychiatry guy from Dept. of Psychiatry, CMC who gave a speech titled “Why This Kolaveri Di Against Psychiatry?” (translation “Why this anger against Psychiatry?”) at age 55. How anybody can work in Psychiatry for over 2 decades by that age and possibly give a speech titled that is astonishing to me. You actually have to be ridiculously dense to see what consequences this profession ends up having on people’s lives, how it is weaponised against people and how many shady tactics they engage in to get people to adhere to “treatment” to actually give a speech titled that.

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  13. I wrote a pretty long sequence of comments on this video featuring a psychiatry graduate named Era Dutta talking about medical Psychiatry as a career (it’s a channel about medical entrance exams): they detailed the negative impact of psychiatric DSM categorisations, “side” effects of meds etc. One person liked 2 of my comments.

    Now, I do not think there is anything “insane” in my comments. However, the response I got was with some guy with the YouTube userid Hiig34567, whose profile (when you click his user id) has only the name “Captain” writing “No sane person has read this comments” and 3 people liked it.

    Generally, I brush away responses by low-grade trolls. But, in this case, I just wanted to make a point.

    This is the sort of mentality you deal with in India for even talking about this stuff. Also, medical Psychiatry harassment is very often linked to getting properties. God knows what kind of backgrounds the people who respond this way even come from and what mentality they have.

    In my case, the housemaid my mother’s husband kept as a concubine+helper (and even the 3rd rate shady lawyer he got her married her off to after the entire debacle was exposed) assisted him behind the scenes in whatever ways he needed so she could get as much property as she could off of the guy. He’d spend lavishly on her and send her to nursing (or whatever) college while I’d be gaslighted, do menial jobs, and walk around like a vagabond because of the guy’s behaviour and everything that happened, while he’d try and use that as part of contrived “proof” of me being “disturbed”.

    I had so many horrific false allegations placed on me (but my mother’s husband’s defensive response to anything even since the early 2000s was just that: habitual lying, putting false allegations of assaults that never happened or things which were never said, manipulating words that were said or written, spreading horrible untrue rumours). Such people might also be reading these comments.

    I read about legal cases these days and the sorts of things people do for properties in India. One was the Sushil Gulati case.

    “In 2000, Sushil Gulati tried to save a woman from molestation in Delhi’s Rajouri Garden. Instead, he was allegedly framed in a retaliatory false rape case, which led to custodial torture, fabricated evidence, and years of courtroom harassment. In a significant judgment delivered 26 years later, the Delhi High Court upheld the conviction of a police officer (sub-inspector Narender Singh) and a lawyer (Haji Mohd. Altaf) for criminal conspiracy, fabrication of evidence, and extortion in the case.”

    Sushil Gulati died in 2014. He (or rather, his corpse) got justice from courts only in 2026. Many never get justice. They just die.

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  14. Perhaps I’m foolish, still in a lot of mental trauma and it’s not good to write all that on a webpage geared for people with no experience with any of this, who are probably still in their mid-20s, in a country where most people’s cognitive native language isn’t English, discussions like these aren’t a part of common culture and all of it ends up sounding insane to them.

    I made the mistake of writing about psychiatry related stuff like this online years ago under my real identity when I was still a 20-year old man with much less life experience, much less understanding of this stuff, going through a very bad transient phase of SSRI induced mania and it was all downloaded, manipulated and weaponised against me later to blackmail, gaslight and subjugate me years after that transient phase was over. Writing about this stuff publicly in India is dangerous (I suppose it’s dangerous in many other places) and it can be used against you.

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    • Dear Friend,
      Don’t hurt yourself further by writing here, if that is the effect of what you are sharing here. To fight one has to be healed and not in pain. On this site we can do but little- don’t worry not many are reading whatever you or me are writing.

      My writing is quite open and on psychiatric platforms too, wherever feasible. Just move away from this whole world of psychiatry and build your life in other domains. All good wishes to you

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      • Nah. It’s not writing on Mad in America that hurt me. Writing here is the only thing that has kept me sane. It was social media accessible to friends and family many years ago. MIA is a pretty safe place. I don’t use it as much as I used to, but I will always check back in time to time.

        And that advice you gave: “Just move away from this whole world of psychiatry and build your life in other domains”. I recognise it. That’s the advice only someone who has gone through the pain of what we go through can give. This profession and everything that families or others do (gaslighting, false allegations, using psychiatric terms as slurs) slowly leads you into a life of relative anonymity and isolation and those isolated have to fight from the sidelines. There are people who have died doing it and it’s not right.

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  15. Dear, I’m glad that you have strength to write about psychiatric violence so openly. It is one of the most commonly used tools in Indian society to subjugate a certain person in the family for vested interest viz, inheritance, taking up responsibilities of the parents in the old age which the other siblings do not wish to take up. They all want a free life devoid of any dependencies or responsibilities, however they have the audacity to claim all the rights that are connected due to being legal heirs. It is the biased parent who encourages this in the family, supported by their conniving relatives. This is so because in Indian Judicial System a person with an unsound mind cannot file a petition in the Court of Law without a guardian. A person with the unsound mind is treated in the category of a minor because just like a minor they are not considered capable of taking up liabilities that may arise in the law suite. On this instance it is pertinent to mention here that a person of the unsound mind is not granted a basic right to justice which emanates from the Fundamental Right – Right to equality.

    Articles 14 to 18 of the Indian Constitution guarantee the Right to Equality, prohibiting discrimination and ensuring equal treatment before the law. They ensure equality before law (Art. 14), prohibit discrimination (Art. 15), guarantee employment opportunity (Art. 16), abolish untouchability (Art. 17), and abolish titles (Art. 18), forming the foundation of social justice.

    Considering this, I believe the offenders are violating the Fundamental Right of a person which is gross violation of the Constitution of India. This perfectly falls in the category of organised crime supported by families, legal practitioners, medical fraternity and most of all the Government of this country which is too busy creating and sorting matters related to religious beliefs.

    Although government has introduced the laws for the disabled and has included mental health as a disability, they have miserably failed in the implementation. It’s only a window dressing for the International Audience.

    The Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, 2016, effective from April 19, 2017, replaces the 1995 Act to comply with the UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It increases disability categories from 7 to 21, raises government job reservations to 4% for “benchmark disabilities” (≥40% disability), and mandates strict accessibility, education, and non-discrimination standards.

    Legal Thresholds: In many jurisdictions, such as under India’s Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, a “benchmark disability” often requires certification of 40% or more of a specified disability.

    Commonly Recognized Categories:

    Physical: Locomotor disability, cerebral palsy, leprosy cured persons, dwarfism.

    Sensory: Blindness, low-vision, hearing impairment.

    Intellectual & Developmental: Autism spectrum disorder, Down syndrome, learning disabilities.

    Mental Health: Conditions like depression or schizophrenia that affect daily functioning.

    To highlight the mental health disability the following may be considered:

    Under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (RPwD Act) in India, “mental illness” is recognized as a disability. It covers substantial disorders of mood, thinking, perception, memory, or orientation that grossly impair judgment, behavior, or capacity to meet daily demands, but excludes mental retardation. Specific conditions include autism, intellectual disabilities, and, as per, any mental condition causing disability.

    Key Mental Health Conditions and Aspects Covered:

    Mental Illness: Defined as a substantial disorder of thinking, mood, perception, orientation, or memory.

    Specific Disorders: Conditions often certified include schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, dementia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

    Autism Spectrum Disorder: Recognized specifically under the Act.

    Intellectual Disability: Includes conditions like specific learning disabilities.

    Mental Behavior (Mental Illness): Broadly recognized, not restricted only to four disorders.

    Rights and Protections:

    Equality and Non-discrimination: Right to live with dignity and equal protection.

    Access to Healthcare: Right to access mental healthcare and treatment from government-funded services.

    Community Living: Rights to live in the community and not be forced into institutions.

    Confidentiality: Right to privacy regarding mental health and treatment.

    Legal Protection: Right to legal aid and protection from cruel or inhuman treatment.The law focuses on a social model of disability, ensuring rights for persons with long-term, substantial impairment.

    Inspite of all that is written in the Official Gazette of India since past 10 years there is little or no awareness that the government has provided to the general public about this. There is no committee or authority formulated to deal with the psychiatric violence and all that social justice talk is just blah!

    Furthermore, to talk about violation of Human Rights here, there is a National Human Rights Commission that exists in India chaired by the Hon’ble Home Minister of India. However, there is no redressal for such issues. The complaints are not actioned, understandably due to the social and financial status of the victims.

    I filed a complaint on the many portals like National Commission for Women, Commissioner of Police, Delhi and related office marking the mail to National Human Rights Commission. I did so because the Delhi Police considered a person of the unsound mind that is me, a National Threat I believe. The police in India is infamous for not being on time. However, they were prompt in arranging ‘force’ at midnight to arrest a mentally disabled person.

    It has been more than a year since I filed my complaint with the aforesaid authorities and I am facing constant mental and psychological torture from the offenders threatening me to be sent to a mental asylum if I do not yield to their whims and fancies. I was thrown out of FedEx a US based MNC which was already paying me peanuts for the entry level customer care job that they hired me for. Simply because the family member who molested me taking full advantage of the ‘labelling’ works in another US based MNC at a senior management position. I have faced humiliation and character assassination by one and all.

    I am a Company Secretary qualified in 2008 and hold membership with the Institute of Company Secretaries of India. I also qualified Chartered Accountancy Intermediate level Exam in 2009 and I hold a bachelor’s degree of Honours in Economics from Delhi University. Now, to make the matters worse Zostel Homes offered me INTERNSHIP for managing ‘vibe’ at their resorts. As consideration for my employment they are offering me ‘accommodation and food’. However, no monetary emoluments are offered. To my understanding, I’m overqualified for this role. Therefore, I declined their interview call.

    To conclude this I wish to reiterate that this is an organised crime and should be strictly dealt with accordingly.

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    • I will write a longer comment later but for now I’ll say just this. Medical Psychiatry related scams for properties where families or others say that another family member is “mad”, “schizophrenic” etc. is just one amongst 100s of other scams in this country. The internet is accessible to everyone and the same kind of scammers and gaslighters read what we write too.

      I have to proceed with caution. I don’t want my “strength” or “openness” to lead me into becoming a corpse (or worse) prematurely.

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    • I can understand what you’ve written here Prachi. However, Mad in America is a very niche website. It’s niche even in America where 1 out of 6 people take some or the other psych med daily, the bulk of people still think that those who criticise psychiatry are scientologists and tinfoil hat wearing crackpots etc.

      In India, it’s even more niche. The bulk of the population of the country cannot even read the language in which this website is in and has no concept of these issues (Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai etc. are not representative of the whole country). It would be like explaining the colour “red” to a man blind since birth.

      While medical Psychiatry harassment definitely gets involved in properties, amongst the scams that exist for taking someone’s wealth, I doubt it’s anywhere close to being common enough where someone will deal with it in the capacity of an “organised crime”. That’s why it’s just you, me and Prateeksha Sharma on this page and not many more. It’s just that when we have problems (which can be severe enough that we want to end our lives), our problems seem the biggest to us but we don’t consider the grand scheme of things.

      Look at the kinds of scams and crimes that happen otherwise.
      —
      From the last 60 or so days (just 10 examples, not an exhaustive list by any means):

      1: ₹15.45 crore (i.e. ~1.6million US$) “digital arrest” scam targeting elderly businessman — Belagavi

      An 81-year-old businessman was allegedly kept under a fake “digital arrest” and duped of ₹15.45 crore by fraudsters impersonating officials.

      2: Panchkula ancestral-property forgery racket

      Police busted a conspiracy allegedly using forged agreements, fake signatures, and fraudulent documents to seize inherited ancestral land after the original owner’s death.

      3: Fake stock-market investment racket — Sonipat

      An interstate gang allegedly cheated a man of ₹18.59 lakh (i.e. ~19,000US$) through fake IPO offers, WhatsApp trading groups, forged trading apps, and promises of huge returns.

      4: Noida ₹3 crore (i.e. ~312,000US$) forged-registry land scam

      A gang allegedly impersonated absentee landowners and used forged registry papers to sell plots worth over ₹3 crore to unsuspecting buyers. Police said the racket had 25+ members

      5: Hyderabad forged-heir land-grab racket

      Five people were arrested for allegedly using fake death certificates, fabricated family trees, forged gift deeds to illegally transfer land ownership in Keesara, Hyderabad.

      6: Fake Aadhaar land-transfer network — Karnataka

      Police investigations into older cases culminated recently with major findings showing accused used fake Aadhaar cards, impersonators, forged sale deeds
      to seize more than 158 acres of land, often targeting elderly or absent owners.

      7: Woman declared dead to grab Baner property — Pune

      Fraudsters allegedly created fake death records and forged paperwork to illegally seize a living woman’s Baner-area property. Police registered a land-grab/fraud case involving fabricated municipal-style documentation.

      8: Everyone of course knows all the call centres from India that scam people both domestically and internationally. Also, various sorts of insurance policy missales, credit card scams etc.

      9: In a major transformer-theft case in Chintalapudi, Andhra Pradesh Police arrested a gang accused of repeatedly targeting rural electrical transformers to steal copper wire for resale in scrap markets. The arrests were reported on 27 April 2026 after a special police operation in the area. Investigators alleged the gang was linked to around 10 theft cases involving 19 transformers located mainly in agricultural and isolated rural zones. Police recovered approximately 160 kilograms of stolen copper wire, estimated to have a scrap value of roughly ₹80,000 to ₹1,50,000 depending on purity and market rates. According to police, such gangs typically operate at night, dismantling transformer components and extracting copper windings using tools and basic electrical knowledge before selling the material through scrap networks.

      10: Mumbai Police busted a dating-app extortion racket operating from a cafe in Saki Naka, Andheri East, and arrested 11 accused in March 2026. According to investigators, the gang used fake Tinder and other dating-app profiles to lure men to a specific cafe, where women would rapidly order expensive drinks and food, causing bills to soar to ₹18,000–₹25,000 or more within minutes. Victims were allegedly intimidated by cafe staff and bouncers into paying inflated amounts. Police also discovered that many “premium liquor” drinks served to victims were allegedly just water while being billed as expensive alcohol. The racket was exposed after an NGO activist and his team conducted a sting operation following complaints from earlier victims. Investigators alleged the operation involved coordinated roles between cafe operators, bouncers, staff, women posing as dates, and handlers from Delhi who managed fake profiles and victim targeting through WhatsApp and dating apps.
      —

      This is the sort of stuff that is far more common and where far more resources go. Medical Psychiatry related property scams are pretty niche. A lot of them wouldn’t even be considered scams. They’ll be brushed under the rug of “family problems”. Very very painful, I know. But it’s just what it is.

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      • There are also many people who come from family backgrounds where they had some form of suffering (depression, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, panic attacks or whatever) but their families, friends or colleagues did NOT weaponise Psychiatry against them. They did not get highly weaponisable “diagnoses” (they might have gotten the “milder” ones like GAD, MDD etc.). They pass cleanly through the system and they have no idea why people like us speak out against Psychiatry. They get agitated by critics of Psychiatry. You can find the google review pages of several Psychiatrists (India and elsewhere) where people speak very appreciatively of them.

        Many people have come onto Mad in America, very angry about the fact that this website speaks out against Psychiatry, but they don’t understand nuance. Stuff like “I could not concentrate for 20 years, but finally after getting an ADHD diagnosis and being put on Ritalin (methylphenidate), I am able to concentrate again!”. That same psychiatry graduate who gave that person an ADHD “diagnosis” and Ritalin which helped him concentrate, would have given someone like you a schizophrenia “diagnosis” which made their family accuse them of being psychotic and meds which stopped their menstruation.

        Such people appreciative of Psychiatry see a sudden improvement in their mental well being after a long phase of suffering and do not understand the totality of how the system works because of a lack of life experience (some will never have your or my life experiences). Such clientele make sure Psychiatry lives on and the harms to people like you and me almost never get addressed.

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  16. One more thing I want to say is this: many of these medical Psychiatry and Psychology guys (in Indian departments and departments around the world) are taught in their departments to talk about neuroimaging if their clientele question their help: “do you believe in MRIs and fMRIs?”, “MRI scans prove psychology works”.

    This tactic will work with some poor rural farmer who has no social or economic power at all. It doesn’t work with everyone.

    13 years after I was told this by a psychiatry resident (and also after reading comment after comment online with the same drivel), I went to a neurosurgeon and got a non-contrast brain MRI of my brain. The results were:

    i.) Brain stem and cerebellum are normal. ii.) Cerebrum is normal. No focal lesions noted iii.) Ventricular system is normal. iv.) Basal cisterns, sylvian fissures and cerebral sulci are normal. v.) Visualised cranial nerves appear normal. vi.) Internal auditory canals and their contents are normal. vii.) Visualised dural venous sinuses and deep cerebral veins are normal. viii.) Sella and pituitary gland appear normal. No obvious lesions noted. ix.) Orbits and their contents are normal.

    Basically, it came out clean. It’s utterly pathetic (and even harmful) how many people use this “iT ShOwS uP iN BrAiN ScAnS” argument like fools and they’ll cite some journal paper to validate their views but when you actually put a brain scan in front of them, they have nothing to say. They think it makes them sound very knowledgeable when it’s actually a really pathetic and fraudulent tactic to get people to adhere to “treatment” and this mentality leads to disease-mongering and a “they have broken brains” narrative. For a person who is a victim of other people’s shitty behaviour (and who may have had some symptoms as a result), it’s like converting all of that into a brain disease in the victim. It has very real consequences on other people.

    I came across a person doing this online just a few weeks ago. Such people are all over the world. America, England, Australia, India and whichever country.

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    • I underwent MRI Brain twice during my treatment. I had fainted for no reason that was the first time normal MRI was done. My reports were normal. However, the potency of my medication was increased and then my menstruation stopped. I kept telling the psychiatrist that I’m worried about my menses. He always dismissed my concerns by saying that medicine is essential. After around 10 months when my menses didn’t return, I consulted a gynaecologist. After talking to my mother about my medical history, she was the first one to inform me that my diagnosis was schizophrenia. She spoke to my psychiatrist and sought permission to get MRI brain done, this time with contrast. My reports revealed that there was some issue with my pituitary gland. She discussed that with my psychiatrist and after that he had to make changes to my medication. After sometime my menses resumed.

      I had lost my sex drive during my treatment. I became a fit case for slavery. No money, no employment and no partner.

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  17. On 25-Apr-25, I got banned out of a mental health chatroom for saying that psych labels are not explanations of problems (they are just categorisations). The “you are not a medical professional” card was used and I’m allegedly a danger to the chatters with my views. Also had the false allegation of “you are attempting to talk people out of seeing their doctors” put.

    There was a woman raving about how she’s borderline and that makes her meet narcissists and psychopaths. I found it sad how people view their lives through the prism of such terms. I mentioned that going through problems is bad enough without seeing your life through the prism of such labels.

    Here is a transcript (usernames have been changed to Mod and me):

    Mod (18:39:16)
    Hello, me, I’m a mod for this chat and I need a moment of your time, plz.
    Please respond here.

    me (18:39:23)
    yes

    Mod (18:39:58)
    I am sorry, but as you are not a medical professional, and are attempting to talk people out of seeing their doctors, you are being removed.

    me (18:40:05)
    huh?

    Mod (18:40:10)
    TY for your time, please DO NOT return in 48 hours.

    me (18:40:14)
    i did not attempt to talk people out of seeing doctors
    that’s not true at all

    Mod (18:40:33)
    You are saying psychology is not a valid medical field.

    me (18:40:43)
    how does having a conversation about psychiatric categorisations have anything to do with not seeing doctors?

    i said no such thing

    Mod (18:40:52)
    You are mistaken, and because such views are dangerous to our chatters, you’re being removed.

    me (18:41:01)
    please show me where i said “psychology is not a valid medical field”

    Mod (18:41:21)

    [08:07:37] i don’t care how many times they call psych categorisations as diagnoses. they aren’t. we’ve been forced to believe they are, but they aren’t

    me (18:41:44)
    yes, and i stand by that

    https://www.madinamerica.com/2015/04/psychiatric-diagnoses-labels-not-explanations/

    Mod (18:41:46)
    categorisations which are often applied against a person’s will is different

    me (18:41:53)
    there are articles published on it
    by licensed psychologists
    since that’s something that is valid for you

    Mod (18:42:08)
    as I said, you are not a medical professional, and your views are dangerous for our chatters, so you’re being banned.

    Please do not return in 48 hours, ty.

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      • I’ll consider it. I need some time to cool down right now. Posting on Mad in America takes a lot out of me because it reminds me of painful things.

        I’ve seen people go down this path. Write something in a newsletter and Psychiatry graduates read it. If they find it too “accusatory”, they respond with gibberish about how they and their staff all trained professionals, how their treatments are safe and effective and there is no credible evidence of damage from X treatment modality, how patients obfuscate their histories and their caretakers file frivolous cases against them etc.

        They’ll just brush it aside, get back to work the next day because there is no dearth of suffering people. I’ve seen the late Bhargavi Davar go down that path.

        It just reminds me of the words of Jill Edwards (former support group facilitator at Mental Health America) :

        “Speaking your truth to your doctors may be healing, liberating. But, be aware they have a career & an industry to protect. They will never admit guilt & will use any means necessary to protect their interests, including belittling & pathologizing you, making threats, and might even resort to involuntary commitment to silence or punish you for calling them out (I know of many such cases). “

        I don’t want to be another feather in their cap of “achievements” where another “achievement” is “responding to ‘antipsychiatry activists'”. I’ve been through too much hell for that.

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  18. A month ago, I wrote the following comment (along with follow-up comments going into more details posted as replies) on this YouTube video on the “Dr Praveen Tripathi Academics” channel:

    There is still substantial stigma associated with Psychiatry (especially as you go into more rural, conservative and vernacular regions in India). But that’s not the only thing. It’s not an ordinary branch of medicine at all: it’s like a branch of the law and police force inside medicine and the MOST weaponisable of any branch that exists in a hospital (and in some ways it can be more dangerous over the long term than the police). People who enter into the psychiatric system are sometimes children, teenagers and people with not much control of their life in their own hands. They know nothing about the future social, legal or medical consequences of any of this except that they have some form of suffering (which depending on the case, could be severe) and they want some relief (or others around them want it).

    Every aspect of Psychiatry, including its language of “mood disorders”, “personality disorders”, “oppositional defiant disorder”, its practice of involuntary commitment and in-patient stays, its “family history” concepts etc. can be weaponised against a person by their family members or others. Of course, there are people who come from good families and environments and still suffer from depression or hallucinations – psychiatry can help them. Those cases are different. I’m speaking about cases where there is legitimate maltreatment or trauma in a person’s life.

    It can become really serious and bring a person down to the roads. Contrary to healing psychological distress, families can use it to gaslight and subjugate a person (what is gaslighting? Gaslighting is the practice of psychologically manipulating someone into questioning their own sanity, memory, or powers of reasoning). They can threaten a person with psychiatric wards. Psychiatric “diagnoses” and histories can be twisted and used by people in Indian courts to put false allegations on a person or they can also be used as slurs/gaalis at home or in social contexts: “mental bipolar hai saale ko”, “borderline pagal ladki hai saali”, “schizophrenia vaala psycho hai saala”. It is not a joke at all.

    Medical Psychiatry harassment from families, saying that family members are “pagal log”, “mental bipolar”, “pagal schizophrenia” (because they do not agree with their views or behaviour and cannot see the flaws in their own) is a very real thing in India, it can cause serious mental trauma leading to the re-maltreatment of an already maltreated person and it’s not very spoken about. There are a few videos like “Women Institutionalised Against their Will in India” on YouTube that show it but it’s not much.

    In some cases, people are also categorised with psychiatric “diagnoses” for side effects of the very drugs they are prescribed. SSRIs like Sertaline prescribed for depression or obsessive-compulsive symptoms and stimulants like methylphenidate prescribed for inattention can cause manic episodes (a feeling of power or euphoria which can eventually lead to full blown delusions where a person may go on spending sprees or behave foolishly – saying, writing or doing things he/she would not normally) and psychosis in some people who have never experienced such things before taking those drugs. When that happens, psychiatry graduates conveniently relabel those people “bipolar” and inform it to families instead of just calling it what it is: a drug induced effect. If people protest such labelling and such terms being entered into hospital records or discharge summaries, a psychiatry graduate (depending on their individual nature and where they work) might still do it to maintain his/her authority as a doctor despite the client’s wishes.

    To add insult to injury, every person branded that way also becomes a “family history of bipolar disorder” to their biological relatives increasing their risk of being “diagnosed” similarly if they face issues in the future and end up in front of a psychiatry graduate (they themselves or their new physicians may have no idea their “family history” relatives were “diagnosed” that way due to drug induced effects).

    If a person comes from a family that is already nasty/abusive, they’ll just use all of it to say their relative is a “mental hospital vaala pagal aadmi/aurat” even if their relative is a sane and rational person who may have had some sort of suffering due to family circumstances or otherwise. It is not always the truly “insane” or “irrational” that end up in medical Psychiatry (especially if they are high-functioning and have money and power): it’s their victims that do and they can become chronic revolving door patients spending decades inside psychiatry departments constantly being in “therapy”, trying out drug after drug to find the “right combination with the least side effects” while that relationship may disproportionately benefit those who are employees of the mental health industry than the person seeking help and nothing ever happens to family members who were a big part in creating issues in that person’s life in the first place (they won’t change, but will later just weaponise a person’s “psychiatric history” against them).

    It all looks very scientific outside with psychiatry graduates publishing papers that use similar sounding terminology to standard physical medical branches, news reports talking about “new study may shed light on the causes of OCD” etc., but the internal reality both within the profession and the families of people who end up in psychiatry departments can be much nastier.

    My comments were just deleted.

    I posted the same comment on the Era Dutta video and the response I got was with some guy with the YouTube userid Hiig34567, whose profile (when you click his user id) has only the name “Captain” writing “No sane person has read this comments” and 3 people liked it. People like Hiig34567 cannot write a simple trivial sentence without mistakes in it but will call comments going into details of legal cases, civil cases, pharmacological effects of meds etc. “insane”.

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  19. The same has been the case in other places. Ban, delete etc. Forcing us into a corner isn’t going to change the reality of medical Psychiatry or how it, in some cases, compounds injustice with even more of it in Indian society (or other societies).

    How many 100s of these guys from India are now on YouTube making videos on every damn mood disorder, personality disorder and every other psychiatric categorisation in the DSM/ICD. And in every damn language. None of them are talking about any of the damage from this stuff.

    The worst part about medical Psychiatry and the mental health industry is that it does not take into account its own life-ruining impact on people’s mental health.

    It’s a standard pattern for many across the world.

    Person is young, powerless, comes from a family situation where he/she is being maltreated–>person has some symptoms–>person ends up in psychiatry out of helplessness because that’s the only choice they’re given—>person ends up on meds and gets assigned psychiatric “diagnoses”–>family finds out about it–>family (and any others who get to know about it) uses it all to re-maltreat the person and paint them as “psychotic”, “mad”, “schizophrenic” so that their own guilt is not exposed–>person tells psychiatry graduates that this entire fiasco has damaged them even more–>psychiatry graduates get angry and start victim blaming and character assassinating the victim but will not go after more powerful and functional family members because they don’t want to risk their own necks by ACTUALLY helping the person (but they might give fake assurances of family members magically becoming better in the future)–>person is trapped from all sides and resigns to a life of anonymity and isolation.

    Sorry, I’m writing so many comments on this article. I just have a lot to write.

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  20. There is an ongoing nationally prominent suicide right now where the “psychiatric issues” theme has come up. The Twisha Sharma case.

    A summary of the case:

    Twisha Sharma, a 31-year-old MBA graduate from Noida who had worked as a model and actress, died under controversial circumstances in Bhopal on the night of 12 May 2026. She had married Bhopal-based lawyer Samarth Singh only a few months earlier, in December 2025, after reportedly meeting him through a dating app in 2024.

    Twisha was found hanging at her marital home in the Katara Hills area of Bhopal. According to her in-laws, she used a gymnastic or exercise-ring setup on the terrace to hang herself. CCTV footage reportedly showed Twisha walking alone toward the terrace shortly before her death, and later showed Samarth Singh and two others carrying her downstairs. She was taken to hospital but was declared dead on arrival.

    The post-mortem reportedly concluded that she died due to antemortem hanging by ligature, though reports also mentioned multiple blunt-force injuries on her body, which intensified suspicion and media scrutiny.

    The case quickly escalated after Twisha’s family accused her husband Samarth Singh and mother-in-law Giribala Singh, a retired sessions judge, of prolonged mental and physical harassment connected to dowry demands, coercive control, and intimidation. Her family alleged that Twisha had become emotionally distressed after marriage and wanted to leave Bhopal and return to Noida.

    Twisha’s sister Priyanka Sharma also alleged a financial angle to the harassment. According to the family, Samarth Singh allegedly pressured Twisha regarding money, accounts, and assets after the marriage. They claimed she was pressured to create joint accounts and transfer control over finances and shares, and that money/shares had already been transferred after the marriage. The family portrayed this as part of a broader pattern of domination and pressure inside the marriage.

    A message allegedly sent by Twisha before her death became widely circulated online:

    “I am trapped bro. Bas tu mat phasna.” (translation: “I am trapped bro. You don’t get trapped.”)

    The controversy deepened further when Giribala Singh publicly rejected the dowry-harassment allegations and instead claimed that Twisha had psychiatric issues, consumed marijuana, behaved impulsively, and had undergone an abortion/MTP procedure around 7 May 2026. She also alleged that Twisha’s parents had pushed her into the glamour and modeling industry. Twisha’s family strongly denied all these claims and accused the in-laws of trying to malign her character and divert attention from the allegations against Samarth Singh.

    As public attention intensified, police formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT). Cases related to dowry harassment and dowry death were registered. Reports stated that Samarth Singh went absconding during part of the investigation, after which police reportedly issued a lookout notice and announced a ₹10,000 reward for information about him.

    I do not know who is right or wrong in this specific case since I do not know these people. I’m making a general statement below.

    There’s a general trend in similar cases. “The person had psychiatric issues” card is used as a tactic to discredit the victim. Sure, that person may have ended up in psychiatry due to suffering and may have even received some psychiatric pseudo-diagnosis. But that’s simply used as a justification to invalidate them.

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