The Road to Recovery

Jayasree Kalathil
September 2006

I started self-harming in my teens while growing up in India. I kept it a secret because I didn’t know any one else who did it and was ashamed. I left home and moved to another city in India where I participated in the women’s movement. The women’s movement legitimised my questions about mental distress and about how psychiatry and society characterised women and their mental status.

I first accessed formal services and received a diagnosis of clinical depression with borderline personality disorder when I was in my twenties. (Over the next few years, there would be more psychiatrists and more diagnoses - six at the last count). The ‘help’ I received was mainly medication, which altered who I was and my self image. I stuck with medication for several years but gave it up when I could no longer take what was happening to me. I have also had therapy, counselling and some pooja because my parents believed in religious healing. But it was the sisterhood of a strong group of women that saw me through my worst years.

For the psychiatrist and psychologists, the main concern was to return me to an ideal of Indian womanhood. Everything I did - from my involvement in the women’s movement to my sexuality – was under scrutiny and, from a psychiatric point of view, needed fixing. Several years later I met a feminist psychologist through a women’s group I was working with. Finally the issues that I wanted to deal with received legitimacy and I started on the road to being in control of my distress. I still self-harm and have debilitating depressive episodes, but I am able to manage with the support of my husband and a temporary withdrawal from the world at large.

Over the years I have made it my business to understand and critically look at psychiatry, mental health and mental health services both in India and here in the UK. I have also worked very closely with other service users and survivors, which has been immensely valuable to keep me real and grounded. A significant element in my work is my interest in narratives of mental distress and how that can be used to question and shift the hierarchy of evidence in mental health work.

After I moved to the UK, I found that I had become a ‘BME woman.’ I am still trying to understand what this means for my own mental health. In my first encounter with mental health services here, it was very clear that the psychiatrist had a preconceived idea of who I was based on my being Asian and married - a married Asian woman must be oppressed! If he paid some attention to what I was saying he would understand that the matriarchal South Indian ‘culture’ that I partly subscribe to has very little in common with the assumptions made about ‘Asian culture’ in this country.

Over the years, the demands for addressing the specific issues of women (and men) from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds have been conveniently rephrased in the language of culture. The over-emphasis on cultural capability in services is an example of this. Examine the impact of these efforts and one will realise how superficial and ultimately pointless this is. I don’t want to be absorbed into a mainstream service that negates who I am and what affects me, nor do I want to be treated within stereotypical frameworks based on assumptions made about my race or culture.

Service providers and policy makers should consider the fact that ‘BME women’ is not a homogenous category. Within it is a complex diversity shaped as much by race, culture, faith or nationality as by personal perspectives, experiences and identities. This is why service providers should carefully listen to what each woman says about her unique experiences and needs.