“Maathaa bethakoriche…, shorir bethakoriche…” -Jamila Khatun (name changed), an ‘illegal Bangladeshi Muslim refugee woman’ told the psychiatrist in Bangla at the OPD in a tertiary government-run mental health institution in Assam, India while I was a trainee clinical psychologist. She continued to speak about all the troubles she endures, frequently breaking down by resting her head on the table. Jamila, like many others, spontaneously received a prescription for antidepressants supplied free of cost by the government. All of them experienced constant, chronic trauma in multitudinous forms such as poor nutrition and sanitation, prejudice, discrimination and violence on a daily basis from the Assamese majority and the state apparatus targeting every black burqa-clad woman and bearded man branding them as ‘Bangladeshis living illegally in Assam.’
This paper draws on my clinical encounters at a tertiary mental health institution in which issues ranging from international relations, patriarchy and poverty find their way into narratives of distress blending the political and the personal. Yet, the psychiatric gaze extended to people like Jamila transforming sociopolitical distress into brain dysfunction, ends up producing a “somatic individuality” in which all states of mind are seen as caused by neuro-chemical imbalances to be rectified by psychotropic medicines. For the mental health professionals, these women were merely simple cases of ‘Sylheti psychosomatic’ to be diagnosed and psycho- therapized at the drop of a hat, reducing their personhood, life experiences and trauma to a symptom to be remedied. Any extended conversation with them was unwelcome as it represented a weak, incapable psychologist who failed to ‘do’ a diagnosis of a routine diagnostic category. Taking Cvetkovich’s contention that archives “must preserve not just knowledge but feeling” I press mental health services to foreground affect that consequentially inculcates a deep sense of social justice and human rights in mental health care.
