7 - The House of Love and the Mental Hospital: Zones of Care and Recovery in South India
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2021
Summary
Abstract
The Movement for Global Mental Health has defined the person suffering psychopathology in low-income countries as an abused and suffering subject in need of saving by biomedical psychiatry. Based on fieldwork in Kerala, South India, carried out at psychiatric clinics and a psychosocial rehabilitation centre, this paper examines patients’ experiences of illness, the degree and quality of family support, and attributions made to the role of ‘sneham’, or love, in recovery. The role of love and family involvement may help explain the provocative finding by WHO epidemiological studies that ‘developing’ countries – and India in particular – showed better rates of recovery from severe mental illness when compared to developed countries.
Keywords: love, schizophrenia, social support, Kerala, Movement for Global Mental Health
In recent years, prominent articles in the New York Times, with titles like “A Mission to Heal Minds” and “A Call to Foster Mental Health Across the Globe,” reported on psychiatrists and mental health workers who have been addressing the supposedly underserved mental health needs of people in developing countries. These individuals, many of whom are part of the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH), have led efforts to scale up psychiatric interventions, counter abuse of the mentally ill, and close what they claim is a “gap” between the needs of the mentally ill in these countries and the mental health services that are available to them. Such media coverage sometimes includes a photo of the legs of an African or Asian man or woman with a chain around one ankle, iconically representing abusive treatment of the mentally ill that is supposedly the result of ignorance about mental illness and traditional methods of healing employed in these settings. These stories are compelling, but what this media coverage does not tell the reader is that according to the WHO, people with schizophrenia and related diagnoses in these countries are actually doing better in terms of improvement and recovery than the mentally ill in developed countries where psychiatric services are more widely available and the mentally ill are supposedly better treated. Also, such forms of restraint through an ankle chain are infrequently used in sites I have visited in India and are arguably no worse than methods of incarceration and physical restraint used in biomedical mental hospitals (Mills 2014) – though both forms are problematic.
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- Information
- The Movement for Global Mental HealthCritical Views from South and Southeast Asia, pp. 213 - 242Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021