Trigger warning: mentions of suicidal ideation
I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that’s really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare – Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
The first thing that hits you in a mental health hospital is not the stench of medicine or the people but the loneliness and helplessness.
You cannot even end yourself because even your hair clip is taken from you. It’s good, I guess, given the situation of the mental health hospitals in India, you’d rather end yourself after spending a good 2 days there. It’s crude, but it’s how I felt.
The Stench Of Fear
Mental health institution- the word never generates a positive response in your brain now, does it? It’s never a place for healing, getting help…getting better. Even in films, it’s some Horcrux of horror where hope goes to die.
Growing up, when I was watching better representations of prisons over mental health facilities, I never thought I’d end up there and see the reality with my own real eyes.
Agoraphobia is an extreme fear of places and situations. Agoraphobic people have a hard time feeling safe anywhere, be it an open place or enclosed place, be it a crowded restaurant or an empty parking lot- the feeling of safety is hard to get. Especially for me, as I also struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder, the patients of which are described as people with a third-degree burn of mind, whom any slight changes can hurt.
Life wasn’t easy. I couldn’t escape from college life because being from a middle-class background career and the question of an uncertain future always haunts us. And what would I even do without a college education?
Be a stay-at-home neurodivergent person, someone who is mentally not in the spectrum of what’s typically considered “normal” in a country where suicide is still a criminal act? So what could I do except pile up hundreds of days of anxiety, trauma, and breakdowns before I finally completely just couldn’t keep up? Working hard for my graduation first year and leaving everything behind, like the papers trailing the way of me running away from my exam hall, was the final straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back and probably much more.
Because you can understand a broken back, how can I make anyone but me understand my broken mind?
The Truth About Mental Health’care’ Institutions In India
It happened in 2017. A severely agoraphobic patient, I ran out of my exam hall in fear. Everything I looked at appeared like a giant monster ready to swallow me up. I started running, hoping I never reach the horizon because that’d mean I would have to stop. And to stop meant all my fears would catch up with me. I couldn’t let that happen. But I couldn’t run for long. I grew tired. So, tired, half paranoid, and half drenched in fear, I started slowing down. I slowed down, started walking, and walked straight into a psychiatric ward.
Surely, they would know, right? After all, Psychiatry is the revolutionary branch of science that has made human beings more humane than some beings themselves. No? No.
When I say that I have no mouth and I must scream, it isn’t just for the sake of saying it. There are miles of differences when it comes to mental health in theory and mental health in practice in India.
I started to count every second in my hand because I could do that. With no access to even the library downstairs, prohibition from talking to anyone, no phone calls, no proper counsellors, no human behaviour that’s all I could do. The staff used to tell me better horror stories than Lovecraft himself as they would tell me that my parents wouldn’t come this week to visit me if I acted up. I didn’t know my mental health would be reduced to “acting up” and that after everything, I would have to use the medicine I used way before even doctors came to place in my life- repression.
I couldn’t bear not seeing my parents anymore. It was excruciating. Every day, the counsellor only visited once to ask routine questions without even bothering to hear your answer. The psychiatrist visits once or twice a week, and no matter how much you cry, there’s no way out. Not even a phone call. One day I was crying so much that I started puking there, and the first thing I heard while facing the floor was, “what new drama is this?”
I decoded their medicine by Day 3: F E A R.
Since they couldn’t find a so-called “cure” to my condition, they made me fear everything, so I would stop speaking up about it. I was running in circles. I came back to what I was running from- F E A R.
I Did Not Make It Up Inside My Head
People talk about human rights violations in prisons, and rightly so, but what about the violation of rights in mental health care hospitals that are also prisons, where people try to escape their own prison-like minds?
2013, Lumbini Park Mental Hospital of Kolkata: Around 30 male patients huddle in a dormitory in torn up clothes, whereas two female patients lie in a corridor outside the female dormitory. The lavatory smells of the deepest pit of hell.
Pavlov Mental Hospital: Around 400 patients share the bed of 250 people, with the severe patients even locked up in 4×5 feet cells. What if you contract lice in such an inhuman condition? You’ll be sprayed with insecticide and stripped naked.
I am so sick and tired. Tired of watching mental health being used as a weapon against the patient. Mental health hospitals are seen as a dumping ground where the liability that becomes a human being with mental problems is dumped to wash their hands off.
“Parents use it against adult children, men against wives, in divorce, property and custody battles; families use it to ‘cure’ homosexuality and officials to get disabled beggars off the streets. The forced institutionalization of mental-health patients is rampant despite a law to protect them,” Deepa Padmanabhan writes.
When NHRC was asked to do a report on mental health institutions, most of them lacked basic things like ventilation and clear water, let alone a proper infrastructure for treatment.
The Mental Healthcare Act of 1987 didn’t really care for the rights of people with mental illness. The revised version of MHA that is in place now includes clauses for the mentally ill person’s family members to seek the mandatory permission of the magistrate before admission of the said person. But how much of that act is getting implemented? An anonymous Delhi based mental health advocate said to Article 14 that influential people often cross this line to right their wrongdoing children or family members. So if this is the case, what hope is left there for the general public? From conversion therapy to torture techniques, it’s abysmal to look at the condition of India.
Call For Justice
We often forget the ocean of statistics is made out of drops of individuals. And it is not just another statistic or number. Every tally mark tolls on the toils of blood. These are marks of blood. I was there to be better. Instead, I became worse and had no one to go to.
I don’t have a mark on my body but only a cathedral of scars that have become my mind.
Most of us have been through fear, loneliness, anxiety, and depression at some point or the other. So why it is so hard to accept it and work for its betterment. Why, in 2022, mental health and the discourse around it is still such a taboo?
How many coffins would it take for people to see the graveyard they are making right in front of them? Or is it because some of us are “talking without speaking, and hearing without listening”?
Ask questions. Ask questions and demand answers because you have a voice, and ask those questions while you still have them because it doesn’t take time for your position to change. So speak while you can and make those unheard voices matter.