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Mental health legislation in contemporary India: the need for inter-sectoral dialogue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

D. S. Goel*
Affiliation:
Southland Hospital Mental Health Services, PO Box 828, Invercargill 9812, New Zealand, email coldsgoel@hotmail.com
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It is said that war is far too serious a matter to be left to the generals alone. The same could be said for the interface between law and mental health. With our narrow, and sometimes myopic, treatment-centric vision we are ill equipped to claim hegemony over the complex domain of legislation as it relates to mental health, even more so in the multicultural Indian subcontinent, where the medieval exists alongside the modern and where abject poverty jostles with ostentatious wealth:

‘The mental health scene in India at the dawn of the twenty-first century is a bewildering mosaic of immense impoverishment, asymmetrical distribution of scarce resources, islands of relative prosperity intermixed with vast areas of deprivation, conflicting interests and the apparent apathy of governments and the governed alike.’ (Goel et al, 2004)

Type
Special Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2007

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