The industries in advanced nations use and reinvest their profits into advanced technology. Consequently, the academia in these nations strive to maximise productivity of the researchers and of workers in general. While this craze towards productivity comes with its own set of mental health problems, it does provide a basis to address some aspects of mental health wellness even though only for the sake of productivity. However, in the backward nations like India, the industries operate on loans and investments from these advanced nations which make us remain technologically dependent and backward. Preserving and using this dependence for capital and technology, these enterprises in advanced nations plunder our wealth, our labour and our natural resources. And thus Indian industry continues to remain technologically backward while creating a constant demand for cheap labour and cheap raw materials.
To provide for this demand of cheap labour, and cheap mental labour in particular, Indian academia, especially its elite institutes have a deeply toxic work environment and a culture of working long hours with lesser productivity. This has led to a terrible situation of students suffering from mental health issues. However, these issues are rooted in social, economic and even familial trauma that students carry as emotional baggage into their campus life. Keeping that in mind, sensitizing the student mass on these issues and also putting concrete measures to prevent further traumatising of students along these socio economic hierarchies can go a long way in detoxifying this environment. Alongside this, a healthy and nurturing work culture as well as upholding student rights and liberties is necessary. In this context, we stand to witness a curious case of two IITs with two opposite responses to this situation. IIT Bombay and IIT Madras, both witnessing a flurry of student suicides in recent years have responded in categorically different ways. IIT Bombay, as per UGC recommendation, have issued an anti-discrimination notice to all students with some points of sensitisation against discriminatory behaviour to fellow students. While enough students died before the IIT Bombay authorities finally woke up to realise discrimination should be prevented, that seems to not be the case for IIT Madras. This IIT has responded with insane surveillance measures using CCTVs and ‘apps’ for parent-student online meetings to “catch” students showing vulnerable behaviour. A rather dystopian version of IISc administration changing ceiling fans with wall mounted fans as a response to student suicides last year.
Prevention of suicides doesn’t mean trying to incapacitate or hinder suicidal people from doing the act within campus premises. Students are not rats that you kill but prefer them not dying inside your house, making it dirty. It means trying to address the causes of suicidal inclination. Though it took too many deaths and outrage, IIT Bombay has taken a first step in that direction. IIT Madras, on the other hand, has doubled down on the toxicity of the campus environment. Now, every student there will have the additional burden of being watched by this toxic administration every step of their way.
At the heart of this lies the problem of individualising the mental health problem. To see it as entirely an issue of the individual suffering from it.
While there are definitely some individual particularities involved, more often than not the root causes are persistent social contradictions. And a lack of nurturing work environment and liberties for students worsens the mental health situation. This leads to widespread depressed and self-isolating behaviours, addictions as gateways, existential crisis, etc. While therapy and mental health support only provides a temporary solution to these issues and can’t address the root causes, even that isn’t adequately available in most campuses. Lack of psychologists, lack of sensitisation in psychologists, lack of commitment to patient confidentiality, lack of mental health sensitisation of faculties and administration, etc. are very common in every institute.
Under such circumstances, students must unite to demand improved mental health support, lesser and sensible mandatory workload, a work culture that nurtures potential and confidence, prevention of discrimination based on caste, gender, religion, ethnicity or economic background, and a democratic functioning of campus where students, the primary stakeholders of campus, are represented and consulted in decision-making processes. But we face an extremely uphill task as the collective agency of students is under constant erosion across all campuses. Student unions being banned, students rights and liberties being curbed, we are gradually being pushed into a state where we don’t have any say in any decisions made. We must unitedly rise against this, or else, in the absence of a collective struggle against these issues each of us will be left alone to deal with it. And individually each of us are doomed to failure and helplessness.
This insane normalcy of finding that the boarder next door has killed themselves will never cease and only worsen further.
