Jul 04 2015 68 mins 8
SynTalk thinks about insanity, madness, and mental illness, & its links with questions of medicine, physiology, freedom, control, knowledge and power. We weave together both theoretical explication as well as purely personal reflections to try and understand madness, and journey in and out of mental asylums a few times. Can we understand madness ‘itself’ as a truth beyond any discussion? The concepts are derived off / from Descartes, Auguste Comte, Philippe Pinel, Owen A. R. Berkeley Hill, Jal Dhunjibhoy, Durkheim, Amartya Sen, & Jeffrey Masson, among others. What makes a (happy, purposeful, & successful) human being go mad, & can there be a master narrative? Would you prefer to be called mad rather than mentally ill? Is the core question the need (or not?) for defining the ‘abnormal’? Why & how are the mental disorders categorically or syndromally diagnosed across multiple axes? Is the DSM atheoretical, and might it be linked to our, often only partially organized, deeply held beliefs? Is the naming and formulation of the problem intimately linked with the philosophical perspective that one adopts? Can one understand the birth of the concept of the (lunatic) asylum and private madhouses? Do people ever leave the asylum after retrieving their personhood? The trends and concepts of (de-,re-, & trans-)institutionalization? How the space of madness may be a space of resistance, and then a stepping stone to growth? Has mental illness always been and will be present with human cultures? Is all madness manifested in the inter personal spaces and ‘beside the mind’? The gigantic task of capturing the inter personal and the social domain (outside physiology) when it is not an objective given. We also explore the reflexive relationship between theory, experience, and power (equations), & how we articulate the position for ‘them’. Is our understanding of some conditions, at the same time, not biological enough? Is mental disorder localized in the head? Is psychiatry very far from perfect? The links between workhouses, chains, moral treatment, neurodiversity, pagans, delusional depression, When Elephants Weep, welfare state, diabetes, Governor General of Bengal, ‘care of the soul’,~3000 BC, Serotonin, Psychiatria Democratica, Victorian era, Lahore, & the rock bottom. Do animals get depressed? Is it necessary to articulate the experience of madness? Is the hunger for this understanding a form of anxiety in us? Have the mentally ill been criminalized over centuries, & is there a deep need to not cut ‘them’ off? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Bhargavi V. Davar (mental health advocacy, The Bapu Trust, Pune), Prof. Parthasarathi Mondal (social theory, TISS, Mumbai), & Dr. Alok Sarin (psychiatry, Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science & Research, New Delhi).
