(Trigger Warning: Mention of Suicide, Self-Harm)
In December 2021, the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore) removed ceiling fans from their hostels, in response to rise in student suicides. The irony of a high-ranked science institution resorting to a vainglorious and unscientific response, to a crisis that is deep and serious, wasn’t missed by anyone.
Suicides rates among students in India is at a five year high, displaying 4.5% increase in 2021, National Crime Records Bureau. Over 13,000 students committed suicide in 2021, the report states. However, this
concerning rate of suicide among students, is not to be seen as separate and independent from the problems in society at large. Student communities, education, and university campuses do not exist in a vacuum, but are a central component of the social and economic system that we all exist under. When mob-lynchings of minorities is legitimized in society at large, it follows that university campuses will reflect this culture, in the form of anti-minority and casteist violence by ABVP goons. When the state sanctions and legitimizes an ideology of Islamophobia, through the speeches of ministers, whatsapp forwards, constant propaganda on television, the same bigotry is reflected in the field of education with large-scale legitimacy being provided to the exclusion of Hijabi women from education, as seen in Karnataka. Thus, when our social, economic and political system alienates its hardworking people from their own selves, with 56 million cases of depression, 43 million of anxiety disorders, and the highest global rate of suicides which claim nearly 700 lives every day in India, it is bound to have an impact on students as well.
It is clear that removing ceiling fans by IISc authorities is hardly intended to be a solution. It serves the air of denialism that has harmed our understanding of mental illnesses and neurodivergence. That being said, what then are some approaches that can be of help to us? Let us begin by examining the various available options presented before us, as possible solutions to the rising mental health distress among
working people and students.
Individualist Responses
In the context of neoliberal capitalism, mainstream responses to mental health problems come from an individualist standpoint. This dominant narrative, which also encompasses the psychiatric industry, holds the propensity to explain away problems that are rooted in social, economic and political factors, by holding an individual responsible for their own distress. Therefore, the solutions they provide are also oriented towards individual self improvement (hoards of how-to-be-a-billionaire self-help books crowding the market), consumerism (the key to better mental health is purported to lie in buying a host of products that the majority cannot afford), or life-stylism (changes in lifestyle, some expensive coffee, meditation and a morning walk, are said to solve all problems, even though the advertised lifestyle is realistically unattainable for the majority of working people and students.) Self-help gurus have emerged as an industry to sell this brand of mindfulness. This dominant ideology is incapable of understanding the real problem and addressing its root cause. It makes us believe that we ourselves are the cause of our suffering. It presents the real cause as the solution.
Psychiatry as Industry and State Apparatus
To understand the prevalence of mental illness in our society, we must be able to appreciate its social and economic basis. Theory of alienation is a helpful tool for the same. In a capitalist system, where profit-motive is the driving force, the working people are required to sell their ability to labour, to be able to afford to stay alive. The amount of time they spend at work, they spend it doing work and labour whose fruits will be appropriated by the employers, and reinvested according to business requirements of the owners of capital, to build a world of commodities that stand in stark opposition to the workers who built them. In this process, the worker is alienated from the fruits of their labour. Subsequently, they are alienated from the time they spend doing the labour. This is a phenomenon that should be fairly relatable
to any student who has interned at any organization, mainly for stipend (if any) and certification of experience. And because the majority of people spend the majority of their time doing things majorly for their employers, they are also alienated from themselves. Perhaps your standard email from your manager, micro-managing every nitty gritty of your work, should remind you of how estranged you are. You do not see yourself in the product you create. There are more complexities in this process, but the core of it remains fairly standard. Much of workplace frustration boils down to this.
Many of our reactions that are pathologized and held in medicalized light, are really very normal human reactions to an inhuman and exploitative system. The system and its organizers know this. The psychiatric industry serves to obscure this fact. Therapy under capitalism is mainly intended to ensure that working people can tweak away their frustrations, and go back happy to work every morning (aka, social reproduction.) The goal in psychiatry under capitalism is remission (i.e., no longer having any of the symptoms of a disorder, mentioned in the DSM.) However, we should go well beyond just addressing symptoms. We should address the roots of our discontent.
That is not to say that one shouldn’t pursue therapy, or take prescribed medications. However, the problem is deeper than that, and our solutions must go way beyond that. Albeit much more scientific and helpful than removing ceiling fans to reduce suicides, these solutions still fight merely against metaphorical ceiling fans. Zola Carr writes, “The emergence of US psychiatry harboured an essential anti-politics: the evacuation of any political struggle over the question of the social good and, in its place, the reframing of all mental distress as medical. This medicalization strategy directly resulted from the danger of radical demands for economic equality amid the excesses of the Gilded Age. Desperate to camouflage the real causes of widespread social despair, elites turned to the promise of psychiatry to disseminate a supposedly apolitical scientific expertise.”
Where do we go from here?
We need to raise the demand for better state aid to mental healthcare, better trauma-informed and affordable therapy (that is affirmative of caste, gender, and other forms of oppression), and fight for it. We need to simultaneously fight for a world that cares for the mental well-being of people, as opposed to the bloating funds of billionaires. We have to build networks of solidarity, and community support for people around us, who also require community just like us, but are fragmented from us through the false walls of rugged individualism. We have to go against the logic of individualism, and the profit driven
logic of capitalism.
Let us come together, stand up for each other, and aid each other’s distress. Let us come together to build a world where resources are distributed through the dictum – from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.
