I start this article with the above encounter I had: a Dalit woman seeking mental healthcare in a Brahmin, capitalist patriarchy.

In a recent conversation with friends, we discussed marginalisation being both a major reason for poor mental health and a barrier to accessing healthcare. When I was a child, I had no friends and the girls of my colony used to ignore me. When I gathered the courage to talk to them, they took me to their home. It was the first time I had gone to somebody’s house. They neither offered me water nor allowed me to sit on their sofa. Opening the almirah, they said, ‘Yeh dekh, achhe kapde. Tera baap ye kharid nahin sakta, isliye tu hamari jaisi nahin hai. Nahi toh hamari dost ho sakti thi. [See here, good clothes. Your father can’t buy this, that’s why you aren’t like us. Otherwise, you could have been our friend.]’ That day I knew they had closed the door of friendship on me. 

I wonder how this has impacted my life and my decisions, be it cutting my hair to look ‘pretty’ like them, trying hard to become friends with the ‘coolest people of the college’, or enabling my own bullying by not raising my voice against it. There were ‘light’ jokes on a daily basis on my unclean school uniform which Maa used to handwash daily since I had only one pair. I never figured out what was ‘unclean’ about my clothes or what they meant by ‘mazdoor wale per [labourer’s feet]’. With time, I lost my confidence. Do all these incidents have nothing to do with my caste? 

Manisha Mashaal, an anti-caste activist and founder of Swabhiman Society, a Haryana-based organisation of young Dalit women, talks about the links between mental health, educational institutions, and caste-based and sexual violence. Although studies on global mental health have acknowledged student suicides in India as a serious matter, most of them have not done a caste analysis. In fact, the field of global mental health rarely considers caste as a major sociological factor impacting the physical and mental health of people from South Asian countries. Rob Whitley writes that mental health advocates avoid confronting ‘uncomfortable truths’ in developing countries such as the ‘institutionalized inequality’ of the Indian caste system. This leads to a lack of nuance in the way ‘experts’ understand mental health in India. For instance, the lack of sufficient counsellors and low number of people seeking mental health services are frequently discussed as ‘barriers’ to mental well-being, but the bias that oppressor-caste counsellors have when engaging with service-users from marginalised caste backgrounds is often ignored, as are caste backgrounds of individuals who are able to access the required training to become registered counsellors. 

I faced much caste-based discrimination in school, but my awareness back then was limited. On my first day of college, during a chat with some classmates, I misunderstood ‘convent’ as ‘government’. Thinking I had finally met other ‘government school ke bachhe [government school students]’, I jumped up excitedly, but was stopped and corrected. Instead, these private school students discussed in angrezi basha [English] big cars, luxurious clothes and bags, and bahar gaon ka tour [outstation trips]. I felt invisible. For months I had no courage, hope, or desire to go to college. The sudden urges to cry my heart out; being unable to breathe sometimes; people telling me, till today, ‘Tere paas toh quota hai [You’ve got quota]’; even my close ones acknowledging only the ‘benefits’ I got; questioning myself when people asked me to ‘dress achhe se [nicely]’ for events; the constant humiliations: I now know that these were not normal or okay and that I had real mental health concerns that were not acknowledged by the people around me.

During my masters’ course, I learnt about identities from an intersectional lens. It was also the first time I recognised the importance of self-identity and relooked at my life experiences through the lens of caste. My identity has always been with me, been the reason for things that happened to me, for things I got, for things I lost. Even if I was ignorant about my identity, society knew how to treat me.

With time I also understood that our bodies, which have their own politics, retain memories of struggles; for marginalised people and communities, our trauma is all over our bodies. Dalit trauma has been part of marginalised people’s lives; we are forced to live in a ‘perpetual survival mode’ as Priyanka Singh writes. Our intergenerational trauma starts with the ‘first generation that is directly impacted by threatening circumstances and suffers post-traumatic stress, passed on to the future generations through secondary traumatisation, experienced in the form of emotional dysregulation, chronic anxiety and high stress levels, intra-community violence, unhealthy attachment styles, and higher levels of physical and mental illnesses’. Even in the safest spaces and among the safest people, my body feels a shock when someone puts their hands on my shoulder or back suddenly. 

Now, even with the awareness of my sociopolitical and economic location and despite my need for therapy, it is difficult to afford it. Moreover, though there are conversations around patriarchy, gender, intersectionality, etc., mental health is still not seen from an intersectional lens. People around me go for a movie or coffee or go shopping for self-care. They have the time to reflect on their mental health and well-being. I have felt sad, lonely, and hopeless, constantly feel unproductive and feel guilty. But I cannot afford to feel this way; I have the responsibility of my family. The ideas of self-care and well-being are capitalist, without taking into account affordability and sustainability, especially for marginalised people. Aatika Singh and Shubhkaramdeep Singh highlight how historically oppressed communities cannot afford to check on their mental health and well-being and even ‘the most-educated and well-placed Dalits don’t have access to health care and therapy that is rooted in our socio-political realities’. 

I hesitate to go for therapy and don’t believe it can bring any change in my life. Divya Kandukuri, who runs Blue Dawn, a mental health support and facilitation group addressing intergenerational trauma of marginalised communities, questions, ‘How many understand the intersection of caste and mental health?’ I think very few. 

Mental health carries a lot of stigma; additionally, Dalit communities have been stigmatised by society for centuries. The overlaps between these two need attention and action. What stops me from seeking out therapy is cost, surnames, accessibility, and so on.

Looking back at my life I see these identities of mine – like when I used to get punished for not getting nutritious food to school but only namak ka paratha [salted paratha]. Its impact was never acknowledged as a lifelong trauma, which manifests in my not carrying home-packed food, feeling shame while chewing, and so on. The structure that affects my mental health is never taken into consideration. It reminds me of Rohith Vemula’s last words –

‘The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity …’

Society does not want to talk about this; mental health is a marginalised topic in marginalised communities.