As the government said, I'm a street psychiatrist, I work on the streets of Camden in London.
My work involves not waiting for people to come to me in any clinic,
but going out there crawling in the bushes or in cemeteries, car parks, garages, crack dens.
Posture joins early mornings at 5:30 because the city takes over by seven and the homeless are invisible ized.
I would talk more about the toxicity of the landscape as we go along.
Maybe the title is also apt because we need to talk about the elephant in the room and there are many elephants,
but some of them perhaps we might get to speak about today. My current work is at the moment, my field site is in India, in Delhi,
where I'm working to try out political therapies with those who are experiencing massive social defeat, mainly Dalit population.
And I think in the tradition of any social scientists,
it's very important to declare one's intentionality and where one is coming from and was one interested in that.
And what is the agenda behind it? So I come from a family background.
My parents will cobblers and they went past school university.
I'm very privileged to be here amongst yourselves, and my particular work at the moment is to try and use some of the anti oppressive work,
particularly from Latin American theological origin.
Cultural psychologists inspired by Portaferry by August Ball and then the African fans Fanon to try and see
why the anti oppressive interventions for Dalits in higher education and universities in India can work.
And that's what I'm trialling at the moment, but I'm not going to speak about that so much as a dialogue with my colleague,
who has taught me human geography lessons to be better.
Maybe as we go along will also come together and share with you how we met over this particular topic.
So to start off with really speaking, this is the go to the next slide of.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the challenges of mental health. There are many challenges.
It would be unfair to just say that the challenges are just in India.
They are here as I come to the I realise I don't even use half of my knowledge in helping the
homeless because there are just no resources available to deliver what I think it can be done.
Hope that we can help heal. And this is a difficult situation where one has to keep being creative and imaginative each time as we go along.
But the the the challenges are in many domains.
You've heard a lot during the day when I look to the programme about the kind of
difficulties there is so much about our work on the treatment gap and the word treatment.
And its metaphor itself is a bit problematic because it always means that somehow it's a biomedical way.
Rather than healing someone, it's about treating someone.
But in addition to that, what you see here behind on the left hand side to my right of cotton farmers as we speak over the last 15 years,
about three hundred and thirty thousand cotton farmers have committed suicide.
And I'm very including myself. And I wondered where we are going with this.
This is unending, the problems are getting worse as we go along.
The images used to do with the import of genetically modified seeds sold by Monsanto,
which catch bollworm infection and are bought at a very massive price by these poor farmers who have to buy and get a loan.
And then after the bowl-winning infection, the cotton doesn't grow. They have to go back.
And then this is the company Monsanto says, we you need fertilisers and pesticides, and it is this companies,
these two companies and sell them the pesticides and the fertilisers by which time they've gone into severe debt.
The debt is from local money lenders at 20 percent rates, and you can walk in with a credit card here.
Do most of these garage and walk and walk out with the most? Is that maybe 10 or 12 percent collateral interest rate, but they don't have a bank.
They won't get a bank account, you wouldn't get a loan. They don't have a permanent residence of credibility to borrow money.
So in that situation, when that happens, many of them, almost all of them have committed suicide,
incidentally, are to consuming the very pesticides that Monsanto's sister companies have sold them.
And that's the irony in the tragedy of it, that we are in this situation where we're not talking.
So the agricultural department doesn't have a dialogue with mental health. Mental health professionals feel this is not a mental health problem.
They borrowed money. There's these to the then cultural scientists feel that they're not farming properly,
but the whole toxicity is emerging from the landscape is making the problem very difficult to do to grapple with through any one discipline.
The other part of the slide,
the second part of the right of the women of eating is one thing that you find very popular now in many clinics in in India,
particularly at least where I trained as a psychiatrist,
is that a lot of women presented the clinic with bodily aches and pains often get a label of sanitisation disorder.
And the question is, are these images simply tired?
They're working as daughters, wise daughter in law's sister in laws all day they have to be toiling, and when they present to the clinic,
then their pain and suffering is heard when they get to be told that they have
a summarisation disorder and are making a generalised sweeping statement.
And so it's not always the case that sometimes this is a fake entity, but I want to question that because it's a challenge,
and it's probably the legacy of a Cartesian duality that we have inherited. We see the body and its pain and suffering,
and the whole discipline in anthropology of social semantics and how social suffering is
inscribed in the body has not really entered mental health in any serious fashion within India,
but also within Europe and UK. The extreme slightly on this idea.
This one is just to show you when we talk about access to care.
This is a primary health care centre in the rural part of Mumbai,
and you can see from that picture it's probably not a close up, but basically that's the clinic at the very far end.
That part is full of very sharp stones. Most of the people don't have food there to walk across.
Over there we go to the clinic is always shut and we look at the timings within the corner.
It's Mondays two to four.
Wednesdays three to a three to six Fridays tend to do this kind of a calendar is culturally synchronous with the lives of the people.
We have to go to the market in the morning and for agricultural work in the afternoon,
children to feed or work to be done around the house when at a certain time to cook this, a synchrony is not just about temporality.
It is much more than that because even the language is asynchronous between what people,
as we are trained in the vernacular metaphors embodied in people suffering in their conversations.
I think this particular slide is just an example of a focus series of focus groups we ran in New Delhi to.
The right hand side is a municipality corporation which is air conditioned, and then our research colleagues went in there.
They said they felt like they were in some part of Western Europe. It was very slick.
Everything was air conditioned, didn't look as if it was an Indian office at all.
And when we talked and ran the focus groups here, we had people saying this is meant for development, which was set up.
The ministers, both from the Delhi Finance Ministry and opposition leaders, said that this is development work in the city to facilitate the citizens.
But then we had a voice from this end to say, but what kind of development it is when he's not getting the job?
What kind of progression does that mean? So that's the issue about what these are, people whom we were talking to who.
We're suffering from a range of depressive and anxiety disorders at that time,
you were trying to test out whether the International Classification of Diseases categories matched
and validated their suffering or were they written in a certain space in Geneva by certain experts,
but didn't match with local suffering? And that's another problem in the terms of the vocabulary.
There's an emotional it is a an experience, neal and an experience.
Decent vocabulary. There still is a challenge about how can we work with the two and the two are both good vocabularies are necessary and needed.
One of the activists said to me at a conference in Brunei, when we had a conference on cost and marginality,
he just got up and said, There's nothing about our problem in your textbooks.
And and that is such a striking statement, because all the textbooks this is a this is a chain of authors, publishers, readers,
and this linkage links major publishing companies from Taylor and Francis Mellon,
Publishers of Anthropology to Medicine, Oxford University Press, Yale, Harvard.
These books are written they eagerly swallowed by the Chinese in that part of the world.
Their credibility is based upon mastering that language.
And if you don't mouth that language, you're not held in in the eyes of your Western colleagues.
If you don't publish in their journals, then you're not given that esteem.
So you've got to know how to learn that language and write that language. You've got to know to do it very well.
And I think there is some benefit in that. The question is, once you do that, then what happens to you?
So it's something about what Marie last longer told me when I was doing medical anthropology at UCLA.
It's funny when you put on some a pair of glasses after a while,
you forget that you got the glasses on and there's something else that happens then to you.
So this transformation that Zalman Russia-Georgia talked about between the writer,
the publisher and the reader sets up a gene where everyone gets actualised and transformed and turns into something very different.
So. Some of the problems which are mentioned here already is that psychiatry in certainly in in my country where I train and I'm an Indian citizen.
So I like to be proud to say that I did my training there,
but I did find it always very distressing that we had to constantly internalise these canons that came in from somewhere.
And this colonial template has been internalised so well that it's hard to somehow the other expel it or to try and work around it.
This applies not just to biomedical interventions, but including psychotherapy.
We might talk about it later if we have time to discuss that.
Questions of direct social oppression are missing both in our teaching and in our research.
I use the word direct because that has a slightly different meaning than counting.
Of course, there are a lot of risk studies, epidemiological studies being done to show associations between poverty,
inequality, discrimination, but subjective lived experiences of people's voices and what happens in the agonies and the pain.
Hardly something that we know much about.
Nor do we research.
Nor is that kind of research encourage and does take place, but mainly in social science institutions and these institutions are opaque to each other.
Wasn't hardly any dialogue. It's we don't have a single medical anthropologist, for example,
who's been employed in any of the major National Institutes of Mental Health in a manner that can sensitise trainees in psychology,
psychiatry, psychiatric social work.
This is just medical anthropology out to include other cognitive disciplines like human geography or medical sociology.
And I mentioned a bit about rural mental health services.
There is a failure of the policy. The policy is a question, but why do well-meaning policies always fail at the end?
And it's it's not something that I can answer myself, but it's something that we all often think about.
Where is the resistance to these well-meaning policies and well-meaning policies written by whom and for by it?
For what purpose? And why doesn't it work as an example? Some time ago, the decision was because we need people who are involved,
stakeholders from the village that we should hire the village people and give them a good salary so they staff the rural health clinics.
But soon we found that those workers, multipurpose health workers,
village workers wanted to migrate to the city because the children get better education there.
And of course, they would. What we would all want that life. And so they would all want to leave the village and go to the city,
which is very different than months work on monkeys, the monkeys migrating in the opposite direction.
You get a chance to speak about it. And now I know in recent years you must have heard about the global mental health movement in the Bay Area.
And since it's a charismatic movement which, like all charismatic movements,
run their goals and get routinised and bureaucratised, it's does it have an intellectual cure?
Is a series of policy statements. It uses the metaphor of scale is to scale up what is already existing.
So you scale up for depression, antidepressants and cognitive behavioural therapy.
But try working, giving antidepressants and cognitive therapy to farmers cotton farmers who are stuck in a very, very serious invasive invasives debt,
but also a lot of other calamities that come about with what CBT and what antidepressants are we going to give them that situation?
So just an idea of how such toxicities are emerging through the relationship between various actors in the field of.
I think from here, I just these these are just some of the challenges and not all of them, I don't want to list all of them,
but these are just some of them, which I felt were important that we take on board as we discuss the content of our presentation.
The next one. Yes. OK, so this is where I come in and the footnote is the keynote, I'm the end note.
But so both of this started with a dot of dialogue that should have developed
over the years and my my work is on non-humans and the question of ecology.
But the question here is, I think that ecology is about also a conversation in that sense that both social the already a crowd,
but it's also about a conversation about not policing in advance of an encounter.
What you know, what ecology might do. And my own interests was, you know,
thinking about this ecologically was to kind of go beyond that dichotomy of
the global and the local and the problem of scale that so should mentioned.
In fact, ecology can be seen as a way of crumbling scales. But there is an ecology, I think, at stake, which is the ecology of capital.
There's the ecology of non-humans themselves, and this is what we're going to be talking about.
But there is also what through this talk, we want to propose an ecology of mental health.
OK, that's light, I hope that after this talk, when you have your next sip of tea.
You do remember what we are going to be discussing. These so-called awesome is a major producer of the.
You might not be able to read it the rear and do the the the font, it says are some strong and multi.
And I can't myself and the tea with a rich and multi yes, with an elephant below.
And then it as a bottom of is, this is those things. So then you can cook it and then you have in the top by appointment.
Do? My partner to Her Majesty, The Queen Elizabeth, I wouldn't say so.
Every day elephants are a big part. This is how to advertise. Elephants are known for their tea drinking.
They don't drink or eat.
And in the tea growing region of Islam, they help out by doing a lot of the heavy lifting and carrying would think hard work deserves a cup of asylum.
So sit back and think of elephants while enjoying this deep empathy.
It goes perfect with a brunch or as an after dinner alternative to coffee.
We suggest using and that's the recipe for doing that.
So this is the image that we have of what is now let's unpack what is about the elephants, mental health people and the landscape.
OK, so that that advertisement did talk about elephants doing the lifting, but that's the kind of infrastructural labour that's really on the decline.
But we want to go back to the solid port in the sand where we did a lot of our fieldwork
and this was a landscape or a cartography that largely emerged to a colonial fortress.
Government governance, which was largely about quarantining forests from the local population as a forest officer in the early 20th century,
put it, You know what our imperative is is to fence what is valuable and leave the rest to the local populace.
The emphasis was not only on valuable forest products, which was timber, but also Asian elephants,
which were vital infrastructure at that time for projects of empire and colonial rule.
The Asian elephant, in fact, was the first animal to be protected in colonial times.
The elephant preservation activity in seventy nine rendered the animal into government property,
and the current elephant reserves that you see are actually mapped onto these erstwhile colonial cartographers.
And this operated again. So she was talking about Cartesian ism.
There was a dual Cartesian logic to its operation.
The first was the act of purification, of trying to create landscapes for elephants and separating that from the landscapes of people,
but also the logic of inversion that happened where inhabitants of that environment were inverted into becoming occupants.
And this logic now carries on, even in contemporary the business around citizenship and so on and so forth.
But these logics operated there. So these fraught histories have radically altered the landscape in a sense,
generating what Guha and God Gale actually called many years ago official land the transformations that have taken place,
but equally to enclosures enacted by forest colonial forestry.
On the one hand and the expansion of tea plantations again in the 19th century signalled the emergence of what some have called the
plantation was seen as a kind of alternative to the vocabulary of the Anthropocene and the problematic figure of the Anthropocene.
The plantation of seen, one can argue, identifies a common route to the interrelationships between landscape change,
ecological collapse, capitalism, race and, most pertinently, questions about labour.
The alterations that took place in this in this landscape happened largely to indentured labour,
so people were brought from the Jordan Upper Plateau in the 19th century,
many of them not even making their way to Assam and the violence through which this sort of forest and closures took place in the area.
In the words of the anthropologist, Fabian Elvin left a melancholy effect on local communities,
so these transformations were visceral as they were effective.
It was not just a material transformation of the landscape, but it was affective as well,
and a colonial gaze operated on this landscape, seeking to purify spaces of wildlife and spaces for people.
So these fraught histories and legacies continue even today. As an endangered species,
elephants get special protection from the state leading people to proclaim their government animals or government elephants on our land.
When conflicts between people and elephants arise, the animals are said to be carrying out evictions again,
harking back to memories of people being displaced from forest land.
And in fact, conflicts in the area are rife. But this is largely a kind of vocabulary or a lexicon of social calls it invented by Anglos.
OK, so this is a slide really about how.
From a lack of in a coffin perspective as a metaphor,
the term conflict is being pushed out forward in the media and the literature between humans and elephants.
And during our fieldwork, when you talk to the people, they said, who's come up with this word conflict?
We never use this word. Where's this term coming from?
And is the media the angels who have put forward the idea that there's a conflict?
They think that this is not something that they were being consulted or asked now is the term that they would.
And later on, perhaps some issues, some of their our field note, some of what they have to say,
it'll become evident that this is a problem which actually has vested interests.
It's a war metaphor. It's not what people use themselves.
There are no cognitive equivalents for such a terminal,
some use of conflict and also then leads to the idea of mitigation and then Jews coming in to with
their own agenda to try and then justify what they need to do to deal with the matter as we speak.
I think the problem is getting so bad that now on Elephant Estates,
which is where you see the people and the elephants, it's now almost as they speak every day.
At least one person is killed by the wild elephant in the state of Assam, and in retaliation, every month a tuskers are killed.
People do feel very ambivalent, retaliating because elephant is an incarnation of Lord Ganesha.
It's hard to retaliate. There's a lot of guilt. There's a lot of ambivalence about how do we deal with this situation and their own narrative,
which we'll show later about what they think about how to deal with this problem and what can be done.
The deaths of the elephants are not all by retaliation. Many of them are killed by poaching electrocution, speeding trains.
People have tried every possible thing. They've tried bees, they've tried firecrackers, they've tried electric fences.
Nothing is working and the problem is continuing to grow.
The big corporate estates who operate,
who want to save their tea plantation because once the elephant walks on it, then the the tea crop is destroyed.
They've dug huge trenches all around. But more people have fallen into it and broken their limbs than elephants who managed to work their way around.
The matriarch of the herd would usually try and touch a fence to check if it is electrocuted or not,
and then warn the rest of the herd and then they move around to find other ways to go on the dig below.
Elephants communicate infrasonic sonically, all with the sound made from their trunks and with the thumping of their feet.
But the sophisticated kind of communication I do see in the video clip that we've been showing you.
But the damage is quite interesting. The perspectives are very interesting.
A youth leader in Bodoland Territorial Area of Assam had this to say.
He said, You know, from observation 30 to 40 per cent of encroachment by people into elephant territory is from the big companies,
the tea gardens and via pressurising the circle officer and concerned authorities to assess what is the exact position of the tea gardens here.
So the encroachment is not just by these people who are going in, who are blamed every time there's a flood in Alabama,
but they run with their pots and pans and their children into where?
Where can they go? They don't have the kind of money we have to buy some land.
Some of it is nothing. So they go into the elephant territory to clear the land to carry out subsistence farming.
In those situations, they are vulnerable to attacks.
And once an elephant, if an elephant walks through that small piece of subsistence agriculture, that crop is gone.
That's it. You're finished for the whole year. There's no food anymore. That's the rice you growing, and that's it.
So they have to sit up and guard the crops all night as well, and that has its own problems of crop gardening and exposure.
But the figures of of of the consequences.
Just to give you one figure, it's about 32 million dollars in compensation for the loss of life and damage
to crops and property as a result of these encounters that have taken place.
This is a quote from the Economic Times earlier this year, 2019.
And so this is just you an account that the problem is quite huge and it's been documented by many people.
We are here today to talk more about the mental health dimension of the hidden psychological consequences of this relationship.
I did not use the word conflict, but of this particular encounter between human habitat and elephant habitat.
OK, so I want to talk very briefly about this herd of elephants that I was following with some biologists,
which in light of the kind of infrastructural changes happening in the landscape,
but also in terms of how these elephants were actually adapting to living in human habitation.
This group, which we called full, led by this bull dusters bull, called Tara one named after a place called Tara Julie.
They had formed a very novel association. This is a herd of four bulls, so generally bull elephants in India solitary.
But increasingly,
we're beginning to see the formation of these new configurations where bull elephants will will stick together and form fairly stable herds.
This is actually an adaptive strategy of coping with risk played landscapes so they go and raid crops,
and they often will spend spend nights on DH estates and then kind of do these forays into human habitation, breaking into granaries or raiding crops.
And in fact, the youngest bull that you see there is called Tara for had over the time we observed that actually had to
emulate from the older bull and had the the group had actually become experts at breaking into houses,
doing it in a very, very clandestine kind of manner. Often, actually, they would do it, do it the next day.
People wouldn't realise that the elephants had damaged, damaged their house.
But in many ways, we can think of using sort of new apologies that are emerging in the plantation to seed.
Because if you follow the tracks of these elephants and look at how they inhabit this landscape,
most of their activity, which is diagrammed on the right, is actually outside protected areas.
So in many ways, one can say following the tracks of these elephants, one witness is how they sort of unsettle humanness.
Cartography is that the state and conservation organisations want to impose elephants
specialised in their own ways along and against the grain of God got graphic design.
And I think this becomes really, really important.
When you think of the everyday encounters between people and elephants, such as the one you might see in this clip.
This is a mock attack. And so is it just to give you an idea that far one in the lead?
And that's that, do they're behind.
And that's a tea plantation where they're resting in the daytime, but because people have approached, they've gotten up to do what.
Oh, so he's being told off in Assam is going to go away.
Right, and he doesn't like it, but I would well.
Are they in the notice of the elephants when elephants deal goes up?
It's an indication that it is angry. Look, we got result.
We don't. Oh, oh.
Oh, I know. So it's showing a sign of retreat now.
And you can see the deal there. We don't know what happens now, but just watch your take on whether this thing is going to go inside.
That's what I to do in some form of communication taking place.
I think anybody. That's a mock attack, but when they come at night, it's very difficult for people who live in their habitat to deal with this.
They have to stay awake all night. They take turns guarding the substance that we culture in the process.
They exposed to malaria trypanosomiasis, other infectious diseases in the daytime.
They're tired. The children take turns so they don't go to school, often school in villages.
The problem as a result. The issue is also the fact that elephants can smell alcohol a kilometre and a half away.
And many of them will crop guarding. They do often have a swig of rice wine, which is grown at home.
And when you ask, what is the why did they take because I know the elephant would come this well with such a huge, fierce creature at night.
We need to have the strength to be able to deal with it.
And it's also very cold. And of course, they would like to have a sip.
So that's the problem of having to guard the crop the night, particularly at night,
because the elephant vision is far better than human vision at nine times.
So now I think I would like to come to the story of one such person.
And we had quite a few vineyards, but we don't have time to go into all of them.
But this is Rama Rama is a he's a married to 26 year old truck driver, and he comes from an Adivasi caste background.
So that becomes important notice because you will remember that class hierarchy
operates everywhere and you can track caste on almost any work you do in India.
Caste is something that is a salient aspect of how things work out.
So Ramu and his family live in a mud hut in the plantation with the elephant area.
He lives there with his wife, his mother, his uncle, Anand Ramos.
Dad works about 50 to 100 kilometres away, another tea plantation.
What's important? Members of the tea plantation workers are temporary workers.
They have hired on daily wages. They have no pension. They have no annual leave or sick leave.
So if something happens to you, that's it. You don't get anything, you know, and like us, if we lose our jobs as something, they are available.
If you retire, the pension is nothing. These are temporary workers, daily workers, daily wages.
The family is otherwise landless, the living at the edge of a corporate owned estate without any cultivable land of their own.
They earn a living by working as temporary labourers in adjacent estates.
Now that's when mining me actually had a dialogue and came across.
Man was here at Oxford doing his research on human elephant conflict, and I was asking about what was happening in his head.
The elephants were getting affected deeply in many ways, and I asked, Well, what has happened to the humans then?
And that's when we realised that there's nothing being done to look at what's happened to the humans.
So that's how we got together in a more serious fashion to look at what's the human end of the well being and the consequence to them.
So without any cultivable land of their own, they were living there.
And what happened one night is this particular herd that you saw attacked Ramos hut.
And all of them managed to get out and escape.
The hut was demolished because the elephants have started now coming more and more for rice wine.
It acquired a taste for the wine and a bag of wine is about 60 litres and so that one bag of 60 litres.
They will then go and smash 10 to 12 huts, leaving at least eight to 10 widows times.
Three children with nothing for them. Literally nothing. And that situation, when the family got out in the night, they ran out.
The hut was demolished, but something tragic happened.
There was a kerosene lamp inside the hut that fell over and within a few seconds
the entire hut was set ablaze and everything was destroyed or the property,
the possession, everything. In the morning, the women who sleep at night because it's very hot and the poor, the very scanty clothes on,
they felt quite humiliated, embarrassed in the gaze of the people around and the institutions and their bodies.
But Ramu realised that he was actually a truck driver and his paper truck driving licence got burnt.
Now, for an a see liberal who's formerly illiterate in that part of the world to get another paper truck driving licence is near-impossible.
Negotiations to the bureaucracies, the kickbacks and various things that have to take place to get a new truck driving licence is extremely hard.
So after a while, they call the father back from the and said that he was working.
He came back with his savings to build a new house is not enough,
so they had to take money from the local money lenders at a steep interest rate to rebuild another mud house.
But in the process, his father lost his job because it's a daily wage worker, so he's lost his job as well.
So you can see this the the impact, and it's not a linear consequence of elephant attacks and things happening.
There are multiple ripple effects nine in this whole process.
Ramu then started the drawing and became increasingly quite sad.
And this is the ethnographic narrative that came to months fieldwork,
and we tracked down the details and we found that he started becoming suspicious of his wife,
and he started believing that she was having an affair with someone in the village.
And one day he took the family bicycle, which was saved and smashed that as the only form of transport.
And sadly, we know that bicycle are no longer advertised on television in its Mercedes and Rolls-Royces.
But that's an aside. What happened then was he gets.
One thing he kept repeating, I want a job. He kept saying I got a job who would go around with the trucks,
would wait the lorries and hang around there hoping that someone gave him a job because he wanted his truck driving licence.
It's a lucrative job to drive lorries around the state over there, and someone gave him a job which was to unload lorries.
On stationary drugs and one day when he was doing that, what during this period of time,
[INAUDIBLE] to start consuming a lot more ganja and drinking alcohol.
His wife was pregnant and one day he fell off.
That lorry was unloading the goods. That's when the villagers said that it's time you take this boy somewhere to be seen by
mental health specialists and get him checked because things are not working out right.
His behaviour has changed. He's got a family to look after. It's going to be a father and he's got know.
Responsibilities. So they take Ramu to a local mental state hospital, and that's where I intervene as a psychiatrist to see what happens.
Now, I don't know, this is not so clear for you from the distance, but I'll try and see if I can explain, is there?
No, no. The previous one. Yeah. Maybe I should have you read out to you.
This is how a case load goes in outpatient endo case record the informant's name.
The relation who comes with the informant is the mother.
The duration of illness is sudden. The press leading cause is an acute event.
And it begins with the narrative, which says he was present in a truck accident, a truck accident where he was a helper.
However, not much heard one month ago. But remember the events that took place with the hurt and the attack was six months ago?
Prior to this? And then the list of complaints about darned disorganised behaviour for the past 20 days.
Consisting of wandering away from home at midnight, dressing and undressing repeatedly without any reason, Mick curating in front of others,
which is being in front of others suspicious of others, particularly wife muttering,
self muttering, spontaneous laughing and crying, talking with hands and moments in the air.
Hallucinatory behaviour in bracketed poly substance abuse, ganja alcohol, tobacco, the amount has been put down.
Everything else is all right. He's noted to be suspicious. Well, as an example of a talk that has been recorded by medical professionals,
an indication of what the matter is there has to be some factual evidence provided is a statement recorded here in Hindi,
which says may happen quickly as whole, which means I have come here for a job.
So now that's the first case sheet, so I don't know what you are thinking about and how this narrative of the gaze of biomedicine operates.
Psychiatry operates, but maybe to accelerate and because it should be having time if you go to the next slide,
I want to show you what we observe based upon comparing it with the ethnographic narrative here.
First of all, it really frames a cultural narrative into an organic one.
It starts with a head injury and a fall, and it shrinks.
Spatial and temporal events, the history shrunk to 20 days or two a month, starting with the fall.
Following that, it inverts the language of suffering to see that he is obviously searching for a job.
He's wanting a job but is put down there as an example of irrelevant talk.
And then what it does is the result is a big decontextualised the symptoms.
There's no story there at all. These are just symptoms, whether it is lack of sleep or losing appetite.
But as I think connecting any of that. And so inspired at that time by Murakami short story The Elephant Vanishes.
We thought that it's such a huge elephant which that that it just vanished from, the case notes.
There is no no mention of this elephant anywhere. Would it go back to the doctors and talk to them?
And that's another story which would go up in the discussions of what they said when we told them the actual story.
But the next bit on the second case note is Ramu was prescribed antipsychotics.
He was diagnosis of a from an acute because of any form psychosis and poly substance abuse.
He was given antipsychotics and usually come back with his mother a month later.
The medications are free. They are run by the government, the state government, and that's available.
So they did get the medication they gave back. Then notices comes with the mother.
According to her, the patient is much better than before. No fresh complaints, however, irrelevant doc continues.
So that doc, which is about a desire to want a job that is continuing, is again an indication that the illness persists.
Sickness is still there. It needs to be treated in some way, so he is again given a repeat prescription for another month of antipsychotics.
These are powerful medications. Antipsychotics go into all sorts of parts of the body, including your brain receptors.
They have side effects. Now we know they cause metabolic syndrome, SCO's diabetes, cardiovascular conditions.
I prescribe medications on the streets and I am very wary about what happens when they do that.
They do help and I'm not taking extreme positions, but I'm just trying to contextualise it.
So, yeah, this is Romney's story about what happened.
So going back then to, you know, this sort of fissure landscapes that people inhabit.
So when I was guarding crops with people, they often said that they had to do labour,
gardening crops at night and then again working in the fields in the day. This generated considerable opportunity costs.
The two boys who got was in the same shelter where I was in dropped out of
school because having to support the family was becoming too onerous otherwise.
But gardening crops also generates fatigue. We cope with this through alcohol, a farmer told me.
Not only can you endure, but it gives you the courage to meet elephants at night.
You are from a place with electricity, he tells me. You don't know how elephants move at night.
They move like a bullet. So during my field fieldwork, a man was fatally trampled by an elephant herd at night when he tried to chase them away,
armed with only a torch and a few firecrackers. But there's way more going on in the sort of political ecology.
For instance, alcohol enters the sort of political ecology will be a range of other molecular relations that live elephants get attracted to alcohol.
So in the wild elephants like consuming fruit like durian and marula.
Those of you who know the alcohol model, it's got an elephant on the cover.
But fermented molasses where people were brewing alcohol at home can be sensible by highly macro asthmatic creatures like elephants for miles.
And in fact, WWF printed these two posters and circulated them in the villages,
saying Don't brew alcohol at home, because what happens otherwise is that elephants will come and break in.
But there's again, another kind of colonial history to it,
because this alcohol generation is deemed as illicit because of the colonial policy of the abacavir, the excise tax.
So therefore, elephant incursions can also generate excise ways into the villages.
Therefore, many people, in fact, were brewing alcohol not in their homes,
but actually in their fields to kind of make sure that elephants were not not coming in.
But the elephant also gets and enrolled into the sort of political ecology in many other ways.
So some some of the tea plantations were fairly recent,
and land conversions happened because human elephant conflict had escalated because of a nearby oil refinery.
The deforestation triggered by this mega infrastructure project led to greater elephant
incursions and therefore people abandoning or selling of their land for conversion into tea.
And here you might note that elephants don't consume tea. So what happens is that when you convert land into deep plantations,
this escalates the conflict even more because they're foraging, grounds get reduced.
But once I was doing fieldwork, a huge drain was being dug between the forest and the tea plantation.
The owner of the estate had strategically left gaps in in the drain, which.
Elephants couldn't cross, and these he placed exactly where they were hamlets, and as a farmer told me it is only a matter of time before elephants,
elephant peasants would escalate, houses would be broken, people would move out and the estate owner would then be able to convert that into tea.
So this is what one could call accumulation by plantation, you know, kind of as a play on the idea of accumulation by dispossession.
And these are in many ways the sort of fraught ecology is one sees in the plantation to see, Do you have time to go?
Yeah, yeah. Of just a side, I just want to say that, you know, although this presentation, as we go along, it critiques policies and services.
It no way belies the dedication and hard work which is being carried out by extremely dedicated medical professionals who are out there,
whose voices are not often heard necessarily in such spaces. And such kind of criticism about these modes of the medical gaze that I showed you
can backfire so easily by extracting just what we wish you to convey a point.
But you know, we consider both of them as necessary how well we did so much of the work.
And the question was after doing this ethnography, the British Academy, who have in future funded as fully as other projects have always now demanded.
What are the ethical concerns and issues?
And for us, the question was, you know, eliciting these narratives, this is a gift of imagination of their suffering.
Give it to us, what do we do with it? We hear them.
We publish it. We come here and give a seminar. What else can we do?
The two ladies here whose permission I have, they're both widows. They're both ready for the compensation.
Because if you can prove that your husband died of an elephant fatality, you get one hundred thousand rupees,
but you actually only get twenty thousand because twenty thousand is a kickback to the post-mortem department,
who has issued a certificate to say that the man died of an elephant attack.
Another twenty thousand is 50 miles in the opposite direction by bus to the forest department to put in a written application to get
hold of your claim and then a huge number of go-betweens who guide you where to go because you don't know where to go for of this,
when you go away, when you fill your form in what I mean, if you're not formally literate, you don't understand the bureaucracy what to do.
So then you come home and then the kids are waiting in the village of Mommy's come home.
It's going to bring something for them, some sweets for them.
So there's a whole lot of that transaction that goes on if they have to go out to carry out this compensation business.
So these two are still waiting to women. They do widows.
And mind you, they clinically speaking the vote suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
They both have severe social phobia.
At night, the moment they hear sound, they go on the on the ground holding, clutching their children and lie still.
This is a regular feature because they're living in that area, which is actually elephant territory.
So this is daily living at night and a day. They are living in pain, suffering and fear.
And so we go back one step. One of the things we felt was all the despite the fact that I would go there, spend time and I'm following them up.
They said, You know, whenever there's an elephant in fidelity, everyone comes here.
Many of the journalists and they mentioned to me when time magazine photographers come,
they take photographs to give us one kilogram of rice and they go away. And that's it.
No one ever bothered to come back. No government official comes. No photographers, no scientist.
No one comes back again. And that's how it is.
And for all they could give you, the climbed up a tree and they dropped some beetles and that's in the plate, which they could serve me.
So that that's an equal, an asymmetric gift exchange, really speaking.
So what we did was we took these ethnographic accounts and we translated that
into local assemblies and gave them a written history of what has happened.
Because tomorrow these girls, these young girls, are going to grow up and ask their mother what happened to our father?
They need to know the history of how state violence,
inequalities and spaces that generate these toxic landscapes have had an impact on why and how their fathers died.
And that's the least we can give, perhaps in return to them that they have a written history now available.
And so. In the words of another lady, Rupa, when we were discussing elephant conflict in the focus group, she said, Is there any worth in living live?
Not for our own purpose instead of being displayed in a rage like rabbits.
It is better to die. It seems that we are just occupying space.
The elephants did not come to attack us. Elephant has come for his stomach, just like we do for our stomach till we are alive.
This will carry on. The man will be man. Animal will be animal till such time.
This will carry on till we are alive. We must carry on like this.
Human numbers will increase. You cannot take humans and put them somewhere and elephants.
You cannot chase and put them somewhere. That's the way in which they articulated the problem.
And if we trace the vectors back, perhaps in the discussion, we might bring up how these vectors can be tracked back to deforestation,
large scale wood chopping and ways of wood going and where these tables coming from.
And that's when we start looking at these vectors invariably end up with international treaties,
get alliances and compliances with more international bodies of proxies for global institutions like the WTO, like many other bodies.
So compliance is not just people taking treatment from doctors, but compliance.
Work backwards is complying with these international bodies and regulations and policies by the state.
Maybe we will have more discussions on this later if we talk about how the state is caught in this very difficult situation.
So then coming back to this idea of the sort of three colleges that we'd flagged up, so you certainly see this an ecology of capital,
it's got to do with histories of labour, dislocation dispossession, but also the ecology of non-humans.
These are affective mythologies or affective ecologies. Can we think about distress and animals?
Can we think about, you know, the mental states of elephants?
I mean, this is this is up for grabs, but I think something would you digging from concern from the elephants for what one needs to to think about?
But there's also this whole question about conservation the perpetuation of colonial logics and the enrolment of elephants
to actually further dispossession bid by the state or be it through this sort of logic of the accumulation by plantation.
But in many ways, just this part of the dialogue doesn't help because, you know,
mental health dimensions get obscured, largely because conservation and a psychologist, we often focus on the visible.
And I think you're looking at the ecology of mental health to become really important.
And so that's really a summary diagram to see how alcohol is a mediator.
One of the mediators of the supposed conflict between humans will end up with poor mental health as a result of not just alcohol,
but alcohol is now being deemed illicit for them. This is not illicit alcohol.
This is home grown rice wine, but the state alcohol that is sold is is licenced alcohol.
That's OK to buy. That whisky is okay for the rich to buy the beers, OK for us to buy.
But when they grow rice wine, that's illicit. And so the elephants, at the other hand, have the geology is altered there in the official literature.
They're now criminalised. They're called co-operators. In the conservation literature, there's morbidity in retaliation and fatality,
the psychotic morbidity that I showed you to one such case load and the clinical gains that addicts out local suffering,
which makes it even more difficult to understand what is going on and how do we address this problem?
Yeah, and I think here we need to really think about it, so lots of studies show how elephants are incredibly stressed, but also, you know,
effects like culling have deep bearings because elephants have long term memory, they have deep bearings on socialisation and so on and so forth.
So one can think, whether in the sort of visual landscape of this mining going on where there's conflict,
you know, the elephants are being chased from one part to another. Do they start to embody a certain kind of morbidity?
And is the response is this question of seeking alcohol in some ways a response to this morbidity?
I mean, it's partly speculative, but is something that we shouldn't entirely rule out.
Yeah, I just saw in connexion with that man and me visited the elephant training centre, where wild elephants are domesticated for tourism.
And they are these baby elephants who are whipped and beaten day in and day out every day by the future mahout,
who would one day then be able to get up and sit on top of the elephant and be the elephants rider for the rest of his life.
You can't change about, so you have to beat the baby elephant for a long,
long time till you instilled so much fear into it that it will listen to anything you do.
And that's how the training takes place, and the whipping and the beating causes wounds and injuries,
which the potential moms themselves feel so guilty at night.
Not replied turmeric. And look after these baby elephants as well.
And that night, that guilt drives them to drinking huge amounts of vodka,
which then makes the whole situation of alcohol as a currency actually far more pervasive than it.
From what I understand now, these elephant training camps have now stopped, and some of them did not completely stopped.
But they still they are still quite a few.
So I think this is about how domestication and tourism is connected with the kind of violence that we don't see.
But you would notice when if you were to elicit a biography of a mouth or the making of a mild.
And that was a slight. So we just Colton's talked about skills and narratives, which is the set of symptoms that you saw in the case notes,
you know, fall irrelevant, talk muttering, make gyrating suspicions of someone.
These are what we call the skeletal narratives.
But these Celtel narratives are what is taking place in mental health across the world, not just in India, but everywhere.
We take on lists of symptoms and what the duration is.
But the underlying narrative, the story that connects, which makes explicit the symptom which she calls as a deep narrative, is often not just there.
And this is important for us because as we're getting prioritised as this case, nodes are being adopted.
Pardon the pun, as they go to the insurance companies, as they're being read,
there is an issue where the debate Damien Panopticon as evidence is turning into a pan lexicon.
That's my neologism. But I think once you this enters the written word they go through from one case notes,
and the repeated cut and paste said, every time you go for a follow up to your GP or your psychiatrist.
This is happening here as well as in other parts because you just can't repeat and paste.
And a new narrative is being a stranger is created in your case notes.
So for a long time, there was a project of reading for health professionals that you read and you acquire knowledge.
And I think it's time to think about the project of writing and what are we writing about and how are we editing local suffering?
And which is why I felt this clinical gaze has a certain violence and inherent in that.
And in a sense of the gaze, it causes a sense of UN state of UN settlement in the person who's the subject of that case.
But it is a Dalit or a divorcee, landless labourer or a patient in the clinic or a homeless person on the streets of Camden.
And social suffering is then edited out.
But then what also happens is that people are dislocated and disconnected to that process of writing and experience that in many different ways.
Ali Baba coined the term on home,
which is when a series of social and political processes around you where you at home start making you feel not at home anymore.
I feel that way these days as I crisscross between these deep ends of parties to parts of India and the homeless in London,
who are rising in vast numbers and percentages of getting high and high and resources being depleted.
And so this is to say that this is how perhaps the global race is ecologies.
We deliberately didn't want to use the word local because that gets us into a
dichotomy which really takes us nowhere by saying the global and the local.
And that just puts the thing. But we wanted to suggest that the global actually erases ecologies to its
particular set of statements and policies that are now going round the world.
Because randomised controlled trials have shown that our cities have shown that antidepressants and cognitive therapy is the answer for depression.
So scale it up, just give more of it, give have more resources.
Have more psychologists have wanted the prisons let them be manufactured in plants in Germany or UK?
Export them as much as you can copy them in Brazil and India and give and feed them.
And they wanted the brains of fishes and and everything around us. So that is why I felt ecologies.
We both felt that this was a better term than contrasting it with the local.
Just before we sum up, so this is some of the new work that we've been doing,
looking at inner well-being in Delhi and looking at relations between people in
macaques and how actually the public feeding of monkeys becomes a very important point.
Important conduit through which mental well-being is enacted and that too in public spaces and the behaviour of these macaques are also changing.
Some of the work we've done with Thomas Cousins here,
as well as the Why project and actually how macaque behaviour is changing in these cities to gain access to this kind of food.
So this is very much ongoing work, but we just end with this one slide.
I think this last slide is just very telling because this is my work in the streets.
I work a lot with churches because the church provides coffee and a place for the homeless shelters and clean up.
There's nowhere to go and it shuts in the evenings and the bar after evening to look after yourself.
And women particularly are vulnerable. You have to trade your body off for a whole range of things.
Each human body is about 20000 pounds per year.
For those who own you, they're gangsters around their large networks who force them,
in particular to do things carrying white powder for the boys in the city on Friday evenings to deliver,
as well as prostituting, pimping and all sorts of things.
But when you when I when I see this church, I go in there to see people and talk with them.
You notice that outside the two therapists, and they're full of spikes.
So the city doesn't allow you to rest or to sleep either. I don't know if you can see this fight is the spice.
And you can see how that hostile architecture is also now being enacted with elephants.
And that's the toxicity of the landscape that is emerging as we find ourselves not wanting to have people around us who are in some way a threat,
but there's something inside us that is threatening us as well. But that's another part.
The middle photograph is a man who's in a very, very wet silk duvet.
It's six o'clock in the morning. It's Hampstead Heath. The houses around the police about two to three million pounds worth in the property prices,
the billionaires who work in the stock exchange and investment companies.
He is a gentleman who's come from Ireland all the way. If you track his story, it connects you straight to the Vatican.
And that's shocking. How is it possible that a homeless man and a wet, soggy duvet there lying there?
Sleeping there is connected to the Vatican, but that's where it matters that we hear and we listen to people's stories and those deep narratives.
That's where things can change and they can and they will and they must. And I can tell you that they do not all the times, but they do.
And I wanted to contrast that with the fences reproducing, producing.
So now in Camden, for example, like these fences over here?
Marks and Spencer have fitted alarms not to drive away those who want to steal these alarms.
Only if you go to sleep. They go off. So the city will not let you sleep.
And so that's the situation we are in over here. I mean, we should probably finish this.
Anything else that you want to add to that? So I just want to bring you back to London.
But also to say that this issue about London and the case note is not just to India alone.
These are stock phrases from case notes of an intensive psychiatric care unit
where I worked in Adelaide and I extracted these notes to show you how again,
doctors write about a black Afro-Caribbean patient.
So race enters in here in a very different way, but is important diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, not engaging with the community mental health.
The noncompliant with this medication not picked a prescription from the GP.
Hostile, hostile and aggressive make threats to kill noncompliant.
Expressing paranoid ideas about his psychiatrist refuses to remain informal.
No management problems is vague of many, but this.
This is why I call the band lexicon that this is nurses were writing this.
So when that doctors writing spreads out naturally to nurses, to psychologists, social workers, it becomes a powerful lexicon.
We don't need the panopticon, so to speak, because the surveillance to language makes it near impossible to retrieve a human within that context.
And that is why we developed techniques and ways to which we can dialogue and alternative ways.
Perhaps some of the day, if we were to continue to develop this,
we might come and share some of the work and how we might work in alternate ways to to engage with people.