Why India’s Mental Health Budget Misses the Bigger Picture

One of the comments I wrote on the above mentioned CMC page was this (it was a response to a commenter who wrote: “Great example of practically meeting the needs of mentally ill patients with love and compassion. It’s a challenge for every health care professional”) :
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Not much about any of this is loving and compassionate (this isn’t only about CMC Psychiatry, but medical Psychiatry in general; in any major hospitals). There is compassion but it goes away when people start facing problems due to the nature of medical Psychiatry and they speak up. Then you see that it’s contrived compassion that exists as long as a person follows the authority of the person with the MD (Psychiatry) degree. Not true compassion and actual help that gets people better. There’s a major difference between helping a person and maintaining your employment in a psychiatry department.
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For example, no helpful person will take a teenager from a family where he is dealing with irrational and life-threatening behaviour from the people around, brand him/her “bipolar” when the SSRIs he’s prescribed to deal with his trauma, depression or whatever else, make him manic (which never happened before taking such a drug) and then also inform it to families. When a person says that such terms are stigmatising, they would not deflect with nonsense like “even HIV patients face stigma” when HIV is an infectious disease that has nothing to with someone’s behaviour and the stigma here comes to a great extent because of the terms a person is being stamped with. Only a crook would do that and call it “help”. That’s not help. That’s brazenly ruining a person’s credibility and gearing a person towards a life of invalidation, gaslighting and re-abuse. Medical Psychiatry isn’t even a completely voluntary profession and people who end up in psychiatry departments are sometimes children as young as 4.5 years of age.
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When a person protests for being categorised that way and such terms being entered into their hospital records and written in discharge summaries, they wouldn’t authoritatively ask senseless questions like “why do you want to know this? why don’t you come to our medical college and study Psychiatry if you want to know this?” as if it’s some technicality relevant only to the doctor and these terms don’t get used as slurs/gaalis (“mental bipolar hai saale ko”, “pagal schizophrenia hai saali ko”) and to insinuate a person is “mad” and “psychotic” by family members. If they had true compassion, they wouldn’t brand people in such ways against their will in the first place. This is the sort of crap these people do and it is basically medical goondaism. Some CMC Psychiatry “doctors” have already done it and not just them, but others too. For example, you can read the article “Bipolar by Definition?” written by Jeff Fisher on the Mad in America website. One can google it (though it’s a US based website, very identical practices are executed in India). And this is CMC: go lower down into more rural, vernacular, conservative regions and it likely gets even worse.
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The way Psychiatry people “help” ends up creating multiple other social, legal and medical issues in life later down the line. I’ve seen people try to run out of these places, only to be dragged back in by hospital staff. There are people who already come from abusive families and medical Psychiatry makes things even worse for them once they have a “psychiatric history” and “psychiatric diagnoses” which can readily be used against them again by their families or whoever else. The person can be the sanest, most rational person in general (who might have had some form of suffering due to circumstances), but he will always be seen as a “mental hospital vaala” in the eyes of some people. All the DSM/ICD behavioural categorisations these people have are used as slurs/gaalis, instruments of gaslighting or to shut them up by others.
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Not to mention it stigmatises their whole family because every such “diagnosed” person, in the eyes of medical Psychiatry, is considered a “family history” to everyone biologically related to them and doctors who are short on time don’t even bother to see how someone’s “family history” arose in the first place (in some cases it’s partly due to the very effects of the drugs these people dole out) and sometimes ignore the majority of “normal” family members with no history at all.
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People who find psychiatry useful in managing one family member, sometimes start recommending others to go to these places. The new people have a ready-made “family history” from the previous ones already being there. I know one such family (In India) that adopted a child from an orphanage and even that child’s life got totally psychiatrised (he/she spent years of his/her life in a psychiatry department) despite the fact that child has no biological relation to the family in which he/she was adopted (except that that family would keep in regular touch with medical Psychiatry doctors and recommend anyone with any issues, both within the family and outside, to go to them; now that child will be considered a “family history” to any kids he/she has). More about a lot of this is discussed on YouTube channel goertzpsychiatry’s videos “Is Psychiatry Evil?”, “Is Mental Illness Hereditary?” and “Are Psychiatric Diagnoses Helpful Or Harmful?”. It’s a channel run by psychiatrist Peter Goertz.
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Both medical Psychiatry and the police force (like ordinary police stations in India) are about social control. In certain ways, these guys are even more dangerous than the police. If a man by the name of Suraj commits a crime, the punishment begins and ends with Suraj. The police will not consider Suresh’s son Rajesh, Suresh’s niece Akanksha and Suresh’s grandson Bhavesh, as having a “family history of criminal activity”. They won’t all slowly, as time passes, start ending up in police stations. When Akanksha, later in life, marries a guy named Ankit, Ankit won’t be able to tell her “pagalon ki khaandan se aati hai” (“she comes from a family of mad people”). He won’t be able to say that his son has “genetic problems” to escape culpability if the son feels depressed due to Ankit’s nasty behaviour. No child (nor his doctor) can disprove that he has “bad genes”. Though behaviour has correlations with a person’s biology, in practice, all this turns out to be is basically punishing other family members for the sins of one person.
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In some cases (not all), family members that demand “treatment” for others in the family, require behavioural modification themselves (it’s even worse when such family members are doctors, lawyers or in other technical professions themselves; because that gives them a lot of power no matter how wrong they are). They cannot see the flaws in their own thinking, change their own behaviour or they want to protect their own interests and instead insinuate that their “prey” are “mad” or “in need of help” (their prey having dealt with such people will definitely have some “symptoms”: maybe depression, maybe obsessive-compulsive symptoms or whatever, but that’s besides the point). India is already a highly religious and superstitious country with irrationality baked into it at the baseline. Fully fledged doctors, engineers, law graduates, businessmen and other “educated” people engage in pseudo-science and peddle rubbish. In a country like this, you’ll end up having at least some people dealing with the behaviour of such people end up in medical Psychiatry as “patients” suffering from depression, obsessive-compulsive symptoms or whatever else while the people creating mental hell are out in society being seen as “sane”.
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Medical Psychiatry harassment (from families or anyone else in society) is a very real thing and Psychiatry graduates, when they’re unable to do anything about the problems that arise from the culture of their own profession, start giving fake assurances (“family members will change”, “side effects of meds will go away”) that never come true or they start victim-blaming. The psychiatry graduates move on: one joins a hospital in Canada, another in Australia. It’s the clientele whose lives were terrible to begin with that can become even worse. If clientele make too much of a fuss, character assassination and pathologisation starts. Even more of a fuss and demands for concrete justice, there’s always institutionalisation, medical Psychiatry nurses and ward boys to put them in line. The victim’s mouths shut with DSM terms which basically imply “this person is not to be taken seriously” and their minds shut with meds. The victim never gets justice. The contrived compassion of medical Psychiatry guys like they’re talking to some children is of no use to anyone except themselves in maintaining their own careers and power till the day they retire and die at age 80 or whenever.
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Medical Psychiatry isn’t some “compassionate” profession. It is not an ordinary branch of medicine at all (it’s more like 1/3rd each of medicine + police + legal system). It’s a weapon inside medicine which is weaponised. It sometimes punishes the innocent and allows perpetrators to get away. It destroys some lives and can wipe out family names. It can interfere in getting proper medical care for standard physical medical issues later in life. If a person wasn’t insane before, he can actually become an aggressive freak after the gaslighting from families and society that follows the “help” of medical Psychiatry. These neatly produced videos are as truthful as the videos of people enjoying in Moscow during the USSR whereas the people suffering in gulags were behind the scenes. On top of which they also collect patient data on this stuff to publish papers like “Ayurvedic Medicine in Schizophrenia”. It looks “oh-so-scientific” outside but the internal reality is closer to horse manure. A person can end up on the roads from this (and there are people who already have; not to mention it can screw up even his/her relatives in entirely different family generations). There are many factors like family background, nature of problems etc. that decide outcomes. Some people will go through the system with no issues and proclaim how great psychiatry is and others’ lives will become hell.

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