mental health: an empty catharsis without change

on therapy culture arcs (in India)

kindly note: this is a very nuanced article, divided into two seperate parts, about arguments in favour of/against therapy. None of this is specifically targeted towards any demographic or people. I respect everyone who has benefitted from it, these are just my personal views on it. other than that you can comment, and we can have a lovely chat on the issue.

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PART 1:

Author’s anecdote:

Four years ago, I sat cross-legged in the hot seat as I waited for my school counsellor to arrive. It was my very first therapy session, and I was excited as hell, and that was, until my school counsellor told me (she was my class teacher btw) that this is a strictly academic issues-related session and I could talk ‘only’ about low grades, subject difficulties etc etc. I had genuinely thought I could discuss all my smallest and biggest problems with this person in that chair, and she would magically sort all of it. At least to a certain measure. And that was the last time I ever went to “academic therapies” beautifully disguised under the umbrella of emotional and mental health. Now i agree, as a student academics are almost the biggest most brief part of life, but i was grievously hurt after this single interaction and the counsellors were so hell-bent on the fact that it had to be strictly ‘non-personal’. Automatically, I never ever went back to this three day “mental-health awareness” bullshit ever in my tormentous three years at this school again.

And that is the real experience from where this dissection of therapy starts.

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why therapy culture is making one self-obsessed rather than self-aware

There is a fine line in between validating oneself and one’s actions and actually critically pondering into one’s trajectory of life and changing for the better. And this fine line often blurs when one steps into the clinic with the fear of being vulnerable enough to be labelled as ‘wrong”. The urge to make excuses for actions you shouldn’t be making for emerges out of nowhere. Suddenly, one doesn’t want to be real. They just want to make an image of themselves that is above everyone and every experience and wanna become the Nazi of life.( grandiose narcissistic approach). But therapy isn’t actually about creating endless positive self-narrations. If today or tomorrow one is taking the pain to explain their experiences to a person, they should also be willing to be vulnerable and actively change for the better. Because from every angle, making false self beliefs about oneself and validating every thought, every opinion, not judging it through a middle lens, defeats the entire point of therapy. In simple words: be brave enough to change. If not for anyone else, for yourself.

One of the point that I can obviously not skip while talking about change is the never ending wave of just wanting to accept yourself. We all are human, we make mistakes and sometimes all we want is understanding. Of oneself. Sometimes insight seems easier than transformation.

One has already been through a maniac rollercoaster episode, and they just want peace. Peace that can only come with understanding. But I would say neutrality is the key. Because sometimes people can make peace with conditions that they witness, just because they have been taught to do that since they were a child. To break free is hard. But narcissistic self-obsession cannot obviously help. It is like worse versus more worse.

So if one can afford therapy in this economy, it better should come out with visible change. If not visible to anyone else, at least yourself.

pop psych terminologies, romanticized

In the internet age, people oftentimes also ignore the issues they actually face by self-diagnosing themselves and taking endless quizzes only to come out as an ‘adhd kid’ when they don’t even get the full form correctly (rip buzzfeed). Now, don’t get me wrong, I am very supportive of this particular thing if one can find a sense of community through it. And attention seeking is not the most important thing on the planet right now. Seek attention for all you want, actually i want you to be open about yourself fully if that’s what helps, because people who are actually going through it all, know how hard it is. If it makes them feel at home, and connect with people all around the globe who face the same thing on one or the other hand, it is progressive. It is beautiful, it is mature, but engagement-baiting by adding these ‘tags’ in one’s instagram bio’s when you don’t even fall into that hard dilemma, is engagement-baiting and very oftenly, degrading the actual beings who suffer everyday. Psychological language should never be treated as fashionable. It is not owning the new prada bag (or the gucci one). It is not fighting for who’s diagnosed with the bigger disorder. It is real. And it affects people. So we can very conveniently toss the thought in the bin if it is to only grab attention on algorithms that applaud trashy noise.

People (who actually suffer) can use these labels, yes, but only if it fosters a sense of shared connection. Not if it replaces the person. We are fluid beings, not meant to be packaged into neatly done parcels, we are an amalgamation of every person we meet, of every thought we endure. We are a messy web of interactions and experiences. And at the end of the day, a very human thing would be sympathizing at the least with people who have faced trauma or continue to. Because one cant measure the amount of solidity it takes to get up and go about through every single day .One step I would personally like everyone to take , today itself, would be to stop throwing words like ‘depression’ and ‘trauma’ around casually. Stop glorifying the pain because the next person you now could be on the verge of abandoning themselves(& everything) because of it.

Yes. read the lyric. Now apart from the very obvious insult (chinki) there is another insult in the lyrics. The writer blatantly romanticizes a mental disorder openly. Like smoothly pressurising the audience to embrace being bipolar if it means you will be a certain someone’s dream girl. Like completely ignoring the fact that it is shameful. The shock, the nerve hitting, very rational. And i clearly know we are very far away from reforms inside the media systems, but this could be a start, perhaps? It is a ‘specially abled’, definitely NOT a ‘pagal’. The earlier people understand it, the merrier.

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PART 2:

I, specifically for this article, went back in time and thought about my relationship with that one judgy teacher who loved to comment on my clothes. ‘your skirt should be beneath your knees, beta’ , and ‘nails should be trimmed’ to the point where your skin bleeds from cutting and obviously, the infamous ‘two side plaited hair.’ Now this holds no direct co-relation with the argument I’m about to present, but it, in a way, does. The impossible standards set to be achieved by Indian schools when it comes to studies/grooming and Indian families when it comes to decency. These unfold into massive trump issues because “log kya kahenge” becomes, well, more important than your own child’s mental health. My two inch shorter skirt can make all the boys sexualize me and my two marks less can make me a loser. ‘a khacchar’ (a mule in english), as they say, directly emphasizing you’re no use, of no worth.

This eventually transcends into the system treating us as losers. The NMHS (National mental health survey) of India stated that nearly 80-85% of people suffering mental disorders in India are not actively going through treatments. There is a lack of better resources, especially in the marginalized communities. Also one cannot excuse the fact that nearly seventy percent of the ratio are below the age of thirty five. Rising unemployment, socio-economic factors only add as catalysts into the ever-enlarging problem.

The IIT’s and AIIMS,( premiere govt. Engineering and medical sciences institutions of India) have had taken a toll on the emotional and mental well-being of students so much so, the suicides have not stopped. In IIT’s itself one hundred and sixty. Yes one hundred and sixty students have died in the last two decades. And we all know abut the paper-leaking scams that lead to suicides (in the preparation phase only) of AIIMS. That is NEET. The only thing that IIT Kharagpur’s director has said on this grievous issue is that they will change the fans in hostels of students to curb the means of self-destruction. “The lack of means to self-destruct can potentially bring back the joy of life”, in his words. The “campus mothers” initiative too, did not fail to put my shock level on the extreme high, because now the female staff, the wives of the male staff and every woman in the premiere engineering institution will counsel students who raise a request through the anonymous Ai- powered mental health app. Not only this enforces the fact that women are supposed to be natural caregivers and they are a safe space to vent to in comparison to men, but also they are untrained and underpaid for this kind of job. Instead of taking two steps back and pondering on the actual problems, which are the academic management, burnout normalization, social isolation, fear of failure, they are appointing teachers-cum-counsellors trained on crash courses. But who will tell them they have inculcated the practice to put productivity above emotional well-being themselves only. Address your own causes, otherwise mental health is just a vessel that will never fill up to the brim, because structural inadequacy keeps hollowing it out.

Okay moving on, the Tele-MANAS that the government claims is a free 24*7 mental health counselling helpline also has its pros and cons. From the information gathered through the internet and trying it with a friend, its very on & off. Sometimes calls aren’t picked up after 10/11 pm, sometimes the counselors are rude and what not. But I will particularly appreciate the effort, even if it is small, because there are always, always two sides of a coin:

I would like to close it up by mentioning that therapy cannot, and never will replace community, economic security, institutional accountability or human connection. And therapy can only help to survive broken systems to a level, when the systems themselves are hollowed.