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Mental healthcare speaks an idiom unfamiliar to patients. A major conference calls for a radical rethink, reports DR RAKHAL GAITONDE. 

THERE ARE three types of visitors to Kovalam, a bustling village about 12 kilometres from Mahabalipuram on the East Coast Road towards Chennai. Schoolchildren from the surrounding villages are the noisiest lot, followed by the tourists and the scores of people coming to visit the local dargah that is famous for its faith healers. The setting couldn’t have been more appropriate for the recently held conference ‘Mental Health at the Margins’, organised by The Banyan, a local NGO that works with the homeless mentally ill, in collaboration with the University College of London. The conference had the overall objective of evolving “a broad definition and understanding of theory and practice related to mental health and marginality from both Western and South Asian perspective.”

Indian society is highly stratified, with many glaring inequalities among different socio-economic groups. The worst positioned among them are Dalits and tribals. The caste system segregated Dalits from the rest to such an extent that they were denied basic human rights.

Etymologically ‘Dalit’ word stands for the broken, the oppressed, the crushed, the ground down, the helpless, the poor and low, a term employed by rights activists to refer to ‘untouchables’. Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Dr BR Ambedkar used this word to describe the ‘atishudras’ in the traditional Hindu social hierarchy. Dalit does not refer to a caste but suggests a ‘state of being’ in oppression, social disability and who now cherish a hope of emergence. In the socio-political situation of caste-ridden country; the Dalit community stands for the one whose fundamental/human rights are severely violated. More than one-sixth of India’s population (about 160 million) is Dalits, located at the bottom of the caste system and face what “hidden apartheid.”

Training Material on Essential Drugs
Compiled by: Naveen Thomas, Community Health Cell (CHC)
May 2007

Download the presentation(ppt) 

Worse is happening to medical ethics than a 15-year-old being allowed to operate. Doctors and the pharma industry are flagrantly violating patients’ rights

RAKHAL GAITONDE

RAKHAL GAITONDE