A Story to be told on World Mental Health Day

 

    On world mental health day (10^th October) there are many episodes and stories which need to be remembered and retold. These are in fact stories of phenomenal success and also of the quiet transformation of society which may go unrecorded. I am writing about how from stigmatized false notions about mental health, acceptance was won for counseling and psychiatry in non-cosmopolitan small towns and cities. The acceptance was from the largely illiterate or semi-literate people from the rural society who began to visit psychiatrists without hiding the fact from the others. One such story is about Dr. K. A Ashok Pai, a renowned psychiatrist, a B.C Roy awardee and the first chairman of the Karnataka State Mental Health Task Force before he passed away in September 2016. I do not want to write about the later phase of his career when he was known nationally, much awarded and already a legend but about how it all began.

    He gave up his job as a Government doctor and began his practice as a psychiatrist in Shivamogga in 1979 when Shivamogga was a small city with a population of 1.42 lakhs. Though there were legendary doctors like Dr. N.L Nayak and Dr. H.S Hegde with individual private practice, nothing comparable to the huge multispecialty hospitals existed then. The ignorance about psychiatry was such that even the educated middle class scarcely knew much about it. All across rural society in the Malnad, there were famous shrines and temples where women were (still are) rid of spirits and ghosts, “mad people” were cured. Dr. Ashok Pai would often tell me about the economic and sexual exploitation of young girls and women which went with some of these “healing” practices. Dr. Pai started his practice in a small cabin inside his ancestral house. I wish I were there to see the first patients who walked in for consultation. These were certainly not the upper middle class Viennese women who were Sigmund Freud’s clients! As Dr. Pai would always tell me they were poor rural women whose psychiatric problems had their causes in poverty, patriarchy, malnutrition and the emotional suppression they faced.

    Perhaps it could have taken decades for people to find out about counseling and mental health but for the fact Dr. Ashok Pai was an energetic character who gave talks, radio programmes, wrote columns and later used the television most effectively to spread mental health awareness. Always believing that attitudinal changes in our traditional unequal society are slow to happen, I was amazed to see how within a few years his clinic Manasa grew into one of the biggest mental health centres with nearly 300 patients visiting it everyday.

    I accompanied him on his many journeys in Karnataka. During these journeys I had first hand experience of how had become part of the popular imagination of Karnataka. On busy streets in Bengaluru and the towns where we would stop for a break, people would stand still, whispering Dr. Pai’s name and many would want to greet him, touch him as though to touch would heal them. There were many street corner consultations about mental health! Though not right then and there but later I understood what I had witnessed. A pioneer in mental health who had made common people shrug off negative notions about mental health treatment, who created trust in lakhs of individuals that there is help and succor when the mind is in need of it. For me it is a story which needs to be told many times.

 Prof. RajendraChenni

Director

Manasa Centre for Cultural Stuidies, Shivamogga