I met Aparajita (name changed), diagnosed with ‘mental disorder’, at a shelter home in Assam for my fieldwork.  Describing her husband as ‘a dangerous beast devoid of love’, she pointed to the scars he had inflicted on her.  ‘I have made so many friends at the shelter home, and I don’t wish to leave.’ This hesitation to re-enter the world outside speaks of exclusions, voice poverty, and the domination of patriarchal norms in her lifeworld, which are intertwined with her mental well-being. However, such upstream factors of suffering and ‘enforced unlivability’, as defined by Judith Butler, are almost always excluded by the hegemonic, unidimensional definition of ‘mental disorder’ imposed by mainstream mental health systems. 

The World Mental Health Day, marked every year in October, is primarily used to generate ‘awareness’ about the increasing prevalence of ‘mental disorders’, with the mental health infrastructure bombarding the public with staggering statistics on rising rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental ‘disorders’.  The risk mongering that one in every eight people suffer from ‘mental disorder’ has been addressed by increasing accessibility to mental health services to cure the ‘epidemic’ of mental illness, without any intention of preventing suffering. Nikolas Rose meticulously explains ‘governing at a distance’ that relates to risk-thinking in contemporary psychiatry – the new ways of working in terms of risk assessment and risk management strategies that shape the conduct of mental health professionals and types of judgements they make. Any deviance from the ‘normal’ and established social morality almost always attracts psychiatric surveillance and control.  As a consequence, people whose mental well-being is affected are not encouraged to introspect on larger sociopolitical phenomena and structural inequity that cause and perpetuate mental distress.  

Mainstream mental health discourses, including awareness campaigns, make people believe in distress being personal and in the ability of professionals to churn out ‘mental health’ in people through therapies and medication. The promise of psychopharmaceuticals is given to lift people from distress and make them ‘confident’, ‘socially skilled’, and ‘happy-go-lucky’.  Thus, medicines not only relieve distress but also invoke the quest to attain ‘mental health’, which Stefan Ecks refers to as a ‘monoculture of happiness’. He evidences a continuing shift towards capitalist commodification through pharmaceuticalisation in the context of rising diagnoses of depression and the prescription of a wide range of mood medications. Psychiatric discourses impose social control by shaping the way we imagine ourselves, our relationships with others, and our problems and solutions to them.