1 00:00:07,920 --> 00:00:14,450 As the government said, I'm a street psychiatrist, I work on the streets of Camden in London. 2 00:00:14,450 --> 00:00:18,380 My work involves not waiting for people to come to me in any clinic, 3 00:00:18,380 --> 00:00:26,090 but going out there crawling in the bushes or in cemeteries, car parks, garages, crack dens. 4 00:00:26,090 --> 00:00:34,630 Posture joins early mornings at 5:30 because the city takes over by seven and the homeless are invisible ized. 5 00:00:34,630 --> 00:00:39,320 I would talk more about the toxicity of the landscape as we go along. 6 00:00:39,320 --> 00:00:45,560 Maybe the title is also apt because we need to talk about the elephant in the room and there are many elephants, 7 00:00:45,560 --> 00:00:56,180 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, 8 00:00:56,180 --> 00:01:06,530 where I'm working to try out political therapies with those who are experiencing massive social defeat, mainly Dalit population. 9 00:01:06,530 --> 00:01:09,380 And I think in the tradition of any social scientists, 10 00:01:09,380 --> 00:01:15,410 it's very important to declare one's intentionality and where one is coming from and was one interested in that. 11 00:01:15,410 --> 00:01:20,060 And what is the agenda behind it? So I come from a family background. 12 00:01:20,060 --> 00:01:23,990 My parents will cobblers and they went past school university. 13 00:01:23,990 --> 00:01:32,960 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, 14 00:01:32,960 --> 00:01:36,740 particularly from Latin American theological origin. 15 00:01:36,740 --> 00:01:47,510 Cultural psychologists inspired by Portaferry by August Ball and then the African fans Fanon to try and see 16 00:01:47,510 --> 00:01:54,200 why the anti oppressive interventions for Dalits in higher education and universities in India can work. 17 00:01:54,200 --> 00:02:00,590 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, 18 00:02:00,590 --> 00:02:03,950 who has taught me human geography lessons to be better. 19 00:02:03,950 --> 00:02:10,610 Maybe as we go along will also come together and share with you how we met over this particular topic. 20 00:02:10,610 --> 00:02:19,930 So to start off with really speaking, this is the go to the next slide of. 21 00:02:19,930 --> 00:02:24,970 I wanted to talk a little bit about the challenges of mental health. There are many challenges. 22 00:02:24,970 --> 00:02:29,620 It would be unfair to just say that the challenges are just in India. 23 00:02:29,620 --> 00:02:35,500 They are here as I come to the I realise I don't even use half of my knowledge in helping the 24 00:02:35,500 --> 00:02:41,350 homeless because there are just no resources available to deliver what I think it can be done. 25 00:02:41,350 --> 00:02:49,660 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. 26 00:02:49,660 --> 00:02:54,850 But the the the challenges are in many domains. 27 00:02:54,850 --> 00:02:58,930 You've heard a lot during the day when I look to the programme about the kind of 28 00:02:58,930 --> 00:03:04,450 difficulties there is so much about our work on the treatment gap and the word treatment. 29 00:03:04,450 --> 00:03:09,940 And its metaphor itself is a bit problematic because it always means that somehow it's a biomedical way. 30 00:03:09,940 --> 00:03:12,580 Rather than healing someone, it's about treating someone. 31 00:03:12,580 --> 00:03:22,990 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, 32 00:03:22,990 --> 00:03:28,580 about three hundred and thirty thousand cotton farmers have committed suicide. 33 00:03:28,580 --> 00:03:34,690 And I'm very including myself. And I wondered where we are going with this. 34 00:03:34,690 --> 00:03:39,760 This is unending, the problems are getting worse as we go along. 35 00:03:39,760 --> 00:03:46,510 The images used to do with the import of genetically modified seeds sold by Monsanto, 36 00:03:46,510 --> 00:03:56,920 which catch bollworm infection and are bought at a very massive price by these poor farmers who have to buy and get a loan. 37 00:03:56,920 --> 00:04:01,900 And then after the bowl-winning infection, the cotton doesn't grow. They have to go back. 38 00:04:01,900 --> 00:04:08,830 And then this is the company Monsanto says, we you need fertilisers and pesticides, and it is this companies, 39 00:04:08,830 --> 00:04:15,580 these two companies and sell them the pesticides and the fertilisers by which time they've gone into severe debt. 40 00:04:15,580 --> 00:04:22,270 The debt is from local money lenders at 20 percent rates, and you can walk in with a credit card here. 41 00:04:22,270 --> 00:04:30,070 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. 42 00:04:30,070 --> 00:04:35,710 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. 43 00:04:35,710 --> 00:04:42,430 So in that situation, when that happens, many of them, almost all of them have committed suicide, 44 00:04:42,430 --> 00:04:49,030 incidentally, are to consuming the very pesticides that Monsanto's sister companies have sold them. 45 00:04:49,030 --> 00:04:53,470 And that's the irony in the tragedy of it, that we are in this situation where we're not talking. 46 00:04:53,470 --> 00:05:00,400 So the agricultural department doesn't have a dialogue with mental health. Mental health professionals feel this is not a mental health problem. 47 00:05:00,400 --> 00:05:07,960 They borrowed money. There's these to the then cultural scientists feel that they're not farming properly, 48 00:05:07,960 --> 00:05:19,600 but the whole toxicity is emerging from the landscape is making the problem very difficult to do to grapple with through any one discipline. 49 00:05:19,600 --> 00:05:20,920 The other part of the slide, 50 00:05:20,920 --> 00:05:29,740 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, 51 00:05:29,740 --> 00:05:32,890 particularly at least where I trained as a psychiatrist, 52 00:05:32,890 --> 00:05:40,270 is that a lot of women presented the clinic with bodily aches and pains often get a label of sanitisation disorder. 53 00:05:40,270 --> 00:05:43,510 And the question is, are these images simply tired? 54 00:05:43,510 --> 00:05:52,640 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, 55 00:05:52,640 --> 00:05:57,370 then their pain and suffering is heard when they get to be told that they have 56 00:05:57,370 --> 00:06:01,150 a summarisation disorder and are making a generalised sweeping statement. 57 00:06:01,150 --> 00:06:07,360 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, 58 00:06:07,360 --> 00:06:14,710 and it's probably the legacy of a Cartesian duality that we have inherited. We see the body and its pain and suffering, 59 00:06:14,710 --> 00:06:19,330 and the whole discipline in anthropology of social semantics and how social suffering is 60 00:06:19,330 --> 00:06:25,120 inscribed in the body has not really entered mental health in any serious fashion within India, 61 00:06:25,120 --> 00:06:31,120 but also within Europe and UK. The extreme slightly on this idea. 62 00:06:31,120 --> 00:06:35,380 This one is just to show you when we talk about access to care. 63 00:06:35,380 --> 00:06:39,160 This is a primary health care centre in the rural part of Mumbai, 64 00:06:39,160 --> 00:06:47,650 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. 65 00:06:47,650 --> 00:06:54,430 That part is full of very sharp stones. Most of the people don't have food there to walk across. 66 00:06:54,430 --> 00:06:59,570 Over there we go to the clinic is always shut and we look at the timings within the corner. 67 00:06:59,570 --> 00:07:01,690 It's Mondays two to four. 68 00:07:01,690 --> 00:07:10,810 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. 69 00:07:10,810 --> 00:07:15,970 We have to go to the market in the morning and for agricultural work in the afternoon, 70 00:07:15,970 --> 00:07:24,370 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. 71 00:07:24,370 --> 00:07:28,840 It is much more than that because even the language is asynchronous between what people, 72 00:07:28,840 --> 00:07:37,210 as we are trained in the vernacular metaphors embodied in people suffering in their conversations. 73 00:07:37,210 --> 00:07:45,130 I think this particular slide is just an example of a focus series of focus groups we ran in New Delhi to. 74 00:07:45,130 --> 00:07:51,610 The right hand side is a municipality corporation which is air conditioned, and then our research colleagues went in there. 75 00:07:51,610 --> 00:07:56,380 They said they felt like they were in some part of Western Europe. It was very slick. 76 00:07:56,380 --> 00:08:01,000 Everything was air conditioned, didn't look as if it was an Indian office at all. 77 00:08:01,000 --> 00:08:08,410 And when we talked and ran the focus groups here, we had people saying this is meant for development, which was set up. 78 00:08:08,410 --> 00:08:17,950 The ministers, both from the Delhi Finance Ministry and opposition leaders, said that this is development work in the city to facilitate the citizens. 79 00:08:17,950 --> 00:08:24,160 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? 80 00:08:24,160 --> 00:08:30,940 What kind of progression does that mean? So that's the issue about what these are, people whom we were talking to who. 81 00:08:30,940 --> 00:08:36,460 We're suffering from a range of depressive and anxiety disorders at that time, 82 00:08:36,460 --> 00:08:41,680 you were trying to test out whether the International Classification of Diseases categories matched 83 00:08:41,680 --> 00:08:48,340 and validated their suffering or were they written in a certain space in Geneva by certain experts, 84 00:08:48,340 --> 00:08:53,510 but didn't match with local suffering? And that's another problem in the terms of the vocabulary. 85 00:08:53,510 --> 00:08:58,270 There's an emotional it is a an experience, neal and an experience. 86 00:08:58,270 --> 00:09:07,900 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. 87 00:09:07,900 --> 00:09:15,430 One of the activists said to me at a conference in Brunei, when we had a conference on cost and marginality, 88 00:09:15,430 --> 00:09:19,960 he just got up and said, There's nothing about our problem in your textbooks. 89 00:09:19,960 --> 00:09:29,890 And and that is such a striking statement, because all the textbooks this is a this is a chain of authors, publishers, readers, 90 00:09:29,890 --> 00:09:36,070 and this linkage links major publishing companies from Taylor and Francis Mellon, 91 00:09:36,070 --> 00:09:42,010 Publishers of Anthropology to Medicine, Oxford University Press, Yale, Harvard. 92 00:09:42,010 --> 00:09:48,310 These books are written they eagerly swallowed by the Chinese in that part of the world. 93 00:09:48,310 --> 00:09:52,630 Their credibility is based upon mastering that language. 94 00:09:52,630 --> 00:09:58,600 And if you don't mouth that language, you're not held in in the eyes of your Western colleagues. 95 00:09:58,600 --> 00:10:02,740 If you don't publish in their journals, then you're not given that esteem. 96 00:10:02,740 --> 00:10:07,630 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. 97 00:10:07,630 --> 00:10:12,220 And I think there is some benefit in that. The question is, once you do that, then what happens to you? 98 00:10:12,220 --> 00:10:17,560 So it's something about what Marie last longer told me when I was doing medical anthropology at UCLA. 99 00:10:17,560 --> 00:10:20,560 It's funny when you put on some a pair of glasses after a while, 100 00:10:20,560 --> 00:10:25,630 you forget that you got the glasses on and there's something else that happens then to you. 101 00:10:25,630 --> 00:10:29,980 So this transformation that Zalman Russia-Georgia talked about between the writer, 102 00:10:29,980 --> 00:10:37,540 the publisher and the reader sets up a gene where everyone gets actualised and transformed and turns into something very different. 103 00:10:37,540 --> 00:10:49,480 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. 104 00:10:49,480 --> 00:10:52,690 So I like to be proud to say that I did my training there, 105 00:10:52,690 --> 00:11:00,370 but I did find it always very distressing that we had to constantly internalise these canons that came in from somewhere. 106 00:11:00,370 --> 00:11:10,270 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. 107 00:11:10,270 --> 00:11:16,170 This applies not just to biomedical interventions, but including psychotherapy. 108 00:11:16,170 --> 00:11:20,250 We might talk about it later if we have time to discuss that. 109 00:11:20,250 --> 00:11:26,130 Questions of direct social oppression are missing both in our teaching and in our research. 110 00:11:26,130 --> 00:11:30,300 I use the word direct because that has a slightly different meaning than counting. 111 00:11:30,300 --> 00:11:35,520 Of course, there are a lot of risk studies, epidemiological studies being done to show associations between poverty, 112 00:11:35,520 --> 00:11:43,140 inequality, discrimination, but subjective lived experiences of people's voices and what happens in the agonies and the pain. 113 00:11:43,140 --> 00:11:46,830 Hardly something that we know much about. 114 00:11:46,830 --> 00:11:49,230 Nor do we research. 115 00:11:49,230 --> 00:11:58,860 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. 116 00:11:58,860 --> 00:12:05,190 Wasn't hardly any dialogue. It's we don't have a single medical anthropologist, for example, 117 00:12:05,190 --> 00:12:13,800 who's been employed in any of the major National Institutes of Mental Health in a manner that can sensitise trainees in psychology, 118 00:12:13,800 --> 00:12:16,410 psychiatry, psychiatric social work. 119 00:12:16,410 --> 00:12:24,570 This is just medical anthropology out to include other cognitive disciplines like human geography or medical sociology. 120 00:12:24,570 --> 00:12:28,650 And I mentioned a bit about rural mental health services. 121 00:12:28,650 --> 00:12:35,430 There is a failure of the policy. The policy is a question, but why do well-meaning policies always fail at the end? 122 00:12:35,430 --> 00:12:40,590 And it's it's not something that I can answer myself, but it's something that we all often think about. 123 00:12:40,590 --> 00:12:46,980 Where is the resistance to these well-meaning policies and well-meaning policies written by whom and for by it? 124 00:12:46,980 --> 00:12:55,770 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, 125 00:12:55,770 --> 00:13:02,280 stakeholders from the village that we should hire the village people and give them a good salary so they staff the rural health clinics. 126 00:13:02,280 --> 00:13:05,880 But soon we found that those workers, multipurpose health workers, 127 00:13:05,880 --> 00:13:11,310 village workers wanted to migrate to the city because the children get better education there. 128 00:13:11,310 --> 00:13:17,730 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, 129 00:13:17,730 --> 00:13:23,000 which is very different than months work on monkeys, the monkeys migrating in the opposite direction. 130 00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:31,110 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. 131 00:13:31,110 --> 00:13:36,570 And since it's a charismatic movement which, like all charismatic movements, 132 00:13:36,570 --> 00:13:41,660 run their goals and get routinised and bureaucratised, it's does it have an intellectual cure? 133 00:13:41,660 --> 00:13:48,360 Is a series of policy statements. It uses the metaphor of scale is to scale up what is already existing. 134 00:13:48,360 --> 00:13:53,460 So you scale up for depression, antidepressants and cognitive behavioural therapy. 135 00:13:53,460 --> 00:14:05,100 But try working, giving antidepressants and cognitive therapy to farmers cotton farmers who are stuck in a very, very serious invasive invasives debt, 136 00:14:05,100 --> 00:14:13,480 but also a lot of other calamities that come about with what CBT and what antidepressants are we going to give them that situation? 137 00:14:13,480 --> 00:14:23,650 So just an idea of how such toxicities are emerging through the relationship between various actors in the field of. 138 00:14:23,650 --> 00:14:29,260 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, 139 00:14:29,260 --> 00:14:38,190 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. 140 00:14:38,190 --> 00:14:46,550 The next one. Yes. OK, so this is where I come in and the footnote is the keynote, I'm the end note. 141 00:14:46,550 --> 00:14:52,530 But so both of this started with a dot of dialogue that should have developed 142 00:14:52,530 --> 00:14:59,040 over the years and my my work is on non-humans and the question of ecology. 143 00:14:59,040 --> 00:15:07,380 But the question here is, I think that ecology is about also a conversation in that sense that both social the already a crowd, 144 00:15:07,380 --> 00:15:11,970 but it's also about a conversation about not policing in advance of an encounter. 145 00:15:11,970 --> 00:15:19,260 What you know, what ecology might do. And my own interests was, you know, 146 00:15:19,260 --> 00:15:23,340 thinking about this ecologically was to kind of go beyond that dichotomy of 147 00:15:23,340 --> 00:15:27,360 the global and the local and the problem of scale that so should mentioned. 148 00:15:27,360 --> 00:15:35,820 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. 149 00:15:35,820 --> 00:15:39,780 There's the ecology of non-humans themselves, and this is what we're going to be talking about. 150 00:15:39,780 --> 00:15:48,530 But there is also what through this talk, we want to propose an ecology of mental health. 151 00:15:48,530 --> 00:15:55,070 OK, that's light, I hope that after this talk, when you have your next sip of tea. 152 00:15:55,070 --> 00:16:02,180 You do remember what we are going to be discussing. These so-called awesome is a major producer of the. 153 00:16:02,180 --> 00:16:09,250 You might not be able to read it the rear and do the the the font, it says are some strong and multi. 154 00:16:09,250 --> 00:16:15,050 And I can't myself and the tea with a rich and multi yes, with an elephant below. 155 00:16:15,050 --> 00:16:21,950 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. 156 00:16:21,950 --> 00:16:31,230 Do? My partner to Her Majesty, The Queen Elizabeth, I wouldn't say so. 157 00:16:31,230 --> 00:16:36,120 Every day elephants are a big part. This is how to advertise. Elephants are known for their tea drinking. 158 00:16:36,120 --> 00:16:39,090 They don't drink or eat. 159 00:16:39,090 --> 00:16:47,010 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. 160 00:16:47,010 --> 00:16:51,570 So sit back and think of elephants while enjoying this deep empathy. 161 00:16:51,570 --> 00:16:56,130 It goes perfect with a brunch or as an after dinner alternative to coffee. 162 00:16:56,130 --> 00:16:59,290 We suggest using and that's the recipe for doing that. 163 00:16:59,290 --> 00:17:13,250 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. 164 00:17:13,250 --> 00:17:21,080 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. 165 00:17:21,080 --> 00:17:27,260 But we want to go back to the solid port in the sand where we did a lot of our fieldwork 166 00:17:27,260 --> 00:17:31,250 and this was a landscape or a cartography that largely emerged to a colonial fortress. 167 00:17:31,250 --> 00:17:39,560 Government governance, which was largely about quarantining forests from the local population as a forest officer in the early 20th century, 168 00:17:39,560 --> 00:17:46,940 put it, You know what our imperative is is to fence what is valuable and leave the rest to the local populace. 169 00:17:46,940 --> 00:17:52,880 The emphasis was not only on valuable forest products, which was timber, but also Asian elephants, 170 00:17:52,880 --> 00:17:57,780 which were vital infrastructure at that time for projects of empire and colonial rule. 171 00:17:57,780 --> 00:18:01,680 The Asian elephant, in fact, was the first animal to be protected in colonial times. 172 00:18:01,680 --> 00:18:07,830 The elephant preservation activity in seventy nine rendered the animal into government property, 173 00:18:07,830 --> 00:18:14,070 and the current elephant reserves that you see are actually mapped onto these erstwhile colonial cartographers. 174 00:18:14,070 --> 00:18:17,640 And this operated again. So she was talking about Cartesian ism. 175 00:18:17,640 --> 00:18:20,940 There was a dual Cartesian logic to its operation. 176 00:18:20,940 --> 00:18:28,080 The first was the act of purification, of trying to create landscapes for elephants and separating that from the landscapes of people, 177 00:18:28,080 --> 00:18:34,500 but also the logic of inversion that happened where inhabitants of that environment were inverted into becoming occupants. 178 00:18:34,500 --> 00:18:40,680 And this logic now carries on, even in contemporary the business around citizenship and so on and so forth. 179 00:18:40,680 --> 00:18:48,540 But these logics operated there. So these fraught histories have radically altered the landscape in a sense, 180 00:18:48,540 --> 00:18:56,370 generating what Guha and God Gale actually called many years ago official land the transformations that have taken place, 181 00:18:56,370 --> 00:19:00,180 but equally to enclosures enacted by forest colonial forestry. 182 00:19:00,180 --> 00:19:06,690 On the one hand and the expansion of tea plantations again in the 19th century signalled the emergence of what some have called the 183 00:19:06,690 --> 00:19:13,560 plantation was seen as a kind of alternative to the vocabulary of the Anthropocene and the problematic figure of the Anthropocene. 184 00:19:13,560 --> 00:19:20,460 The plantation of seen, one can argue, identifies a common route to the interrelationships between landscape change, 185 00:19:20,460 --> 00:19:26,940 ecological collapse, capitalism, race and, most pertinently, questions about labour. 186 00:19:26,940 --> 00:19:31,680 The alterations that took place in this in this landscape happened largely to indentured labour, 187 00:19:31,680 --> 00:19:35,160 so people were brought from the Jordan Upper Plateau in the 19th century, 188 00:19:35,160 --> 00:19:44,790 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. 189 00:19:44,790 --> 00:19:50,190 In the words of the anthropologist, Fabian Elvin left a melancholy effect on local communities, 190 00:19:50,190 --> 00:19:53,310 so these transformations were visceral as they were effective. 191 00:19:53,310 --> 00:19:58,500 It was not just a material transformation of the landscape, but it was affective as well, 192 00:19:58,500 --> 00:20:05,310 and a colonial gaze operated on this landscape, seeking to purify spaces of wildlife and spaces for people. 193 00:20:05,310 --> 00:20:09,900 So these fraught histories and legacies continue even today. As an endangered species, 194 00:20:09,900 --> 00:20:17,280 elephants get special protection from the state leading people to proclaim their government animals or government elephants on our land. 195 00:20:17,280 --> 00:20:22,320 When conflicts between people and elephants arise, the animals are said to be carrying out evictions again, 196 00:20:22,320 --> 00:20:26,460 harking back to memories of people being displaced from forest land. 197 00:20:26,460 --> 00:20:38,060 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. 198 00:20:38,060 --> 00:20:42,620 OK, so this is a slide really about how. 199 00:20:42,620 --> 00:20:48,530 From a lack of in a coffin perspective as a metaphor, 200 00:20:48,530 --> 00:20:58,190 the term conflict is being pushed out forward in the media and the literature between humans and elephants. 201 00:20:58,190 --> 00:21:03,320 And during our fieldwork, when you talk to the people, they said, who's come up with this word conflict? 202 00:21:03,320 --> 00:21:08,090 We never use this word. Where's this term coming from? 203 00:21:08,090 --> 00:21:13,790 And is the media the angels who have put forward the idea that there's a conflict? 204 00:21:13,790 --> 00:21:20,600 They think that this is not something that they were being consulted or asked now is the term that they would. 205 00:21:20,600 --> 00:21:26,060 And later on, perhaps some issues, some of their our field note, some of what they have to say, 206 00:21:26,060 --> 00:21:30,500 it'll become evident that this is a problem which actually has vested interests. 207 00:21:30,500 --> 00:21:34,820 It's a war metaphor. It's not what people use themselves. 208 00:21:34,820 --> 00:21:37,130 There are no cognitive equivalents for such a terminal, 209 00:21:37,130 --> 00:21:44,820 some use of conflict and also then leads to the idea of mitigation and then Jews coming in to with 210 00:21:44,820 --> 00:21:52,040 their own agenda to try and then justify what they need to do to deal with the matter as we speak. 211 00:21:52,040 --> 00:21:57,320 I think the problem is getting so bad that now on Elephant Estates, 212 00:21:57,320 --> 00:22:05,990 which is where you see the people and the elephants, it's now almost as they speak every day. 213 00:22:05,990 --> 00:22:18,830 At least one person is killed by the wild elephant in the state of Assam, and in retaliation, every month a tuskers are killed. 214 00:22:18,830 --> 00:22:25,910 People do feel very ambivalent, retaliating because elephant is an incarnation of Lord Ganesha. 215 00:22:25,910 --> 00:22:34,340 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, 216 00:22:34,340 --> 00:22:43,770 which we'll show later about what they think about how to deal with this problem and what can be done. 217 00:22:43,770 --> 00:22:53,760 The deaths of the elephants are not all by retaliation. Many of them are killed by poaching electrocution, speeding trains. 218 00:22:53,760 --> 00:23:00,780 People have tried every possible thing. They've tried bees, they've tried firecrackers, they've tried electric fences. 219 00:23:00,780 --> 00:23:05,280 Nothing is working and the problem is continuing to grow. 220 00:23:05,280 --> 00:23:08,430 The big corporate estates who operate, 221 00:23:08,430 --> 00:23:15,960 who want to save their tea plantation because once the elephant walks on it, then the the tea crop is destroyed. 222 00:23:15,960 --> 00:23:25,050 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. 223 00:23:25,050 --> 00:23:32,370 The matriarch of the herd would usually try and touch a fence to check if it is electrocuted or not, 224 00:23:32,370 --> 00:23:37,710 and then warn the rest of the herd and then they move around to find other ways to go on the dig below. 225 00:23:37,710 --> 00:23:43,590 Elephants communicate infrasonic sonically, all with the sound made from their trunks and with the thumping of their feet. 226 00:23:43,590 --> 00:23:49,440 But the sophisticated kind of communication I do see in the video clip that we've been showing you. 227 00:23:49,440 --> 00:23:54,330 But the damage is quite interesting. The perspectives are very interesting. 228 00:23:54,330 --> 00:23:59,490 A youth leader in Bodoland Territorial Area of Assam had this to say. 229 00:23:59,490 --> 00:24:09,810 He said, You know, from observation 30 to 40 per cent of encroachment by people into elephant territory is from the big companies, 230 00:24:09,810 --> 00:24:18,510 the tea gardens and via pressurising the circle officer and concerned authorities to assess what is the exact position of the tea gardens here. 231 00:24:18,510 --> 00:24:24,150 So the encroachment is not just by these people who are going in, who are blamed every time there's a flood in Alabama, 232 00:24:24,150 --> 00:24:28,350 but they run with their pots and pans and their children into where? 233 00:24:28,350 --> 00:24:32,370 Where can they go? They don't have the kind of money we have to buy some land. 234 00:24:32,370 --> 00:24:38,550 Some of it is nothing. So they go into the elephant territory to clear the land to carry out subsistence farming. 235 00:24:38,550 --> 00:24:41,940 In those situations, they are vulnerable to attacks. 236 00:24:41,940 --> 00:24:49,080 And once an elephant, if an elephant walks through that small piece of subsistence agriculture, that crop is gone. 237 00:24:49,080 --> 00:24:54,720 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. 238 00:24:54,720 --> 00:25:03,540 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. 239 00:25:03,540 --> 00:25:09,270 But the figures of of of the consequences. 240 00:25:09,270 --> 00:25:15,690 Just to give you one figure, it's about 32 million dollars in compensation for the loss of life and damage 241 00:25:15,690 --> 00:25:19,980 to crops and property as a result of these encounters that have taken place. 242 00:25:19,980 --> 00:25:24,960 This is a quote from the Economic Times earlier this year, 2019. 243 00:25:24,960 --> 00:25:30,540 And so this is just you an account that the problem is quite huge and it's been documented by many people. 244 00:25:30,540 --> 00:25:38,370 We are here today to talk more about the mental health dimension of the hidden psychological consequences of this relationship. 245 00:25:38,370 --> 00:25:47,130 I did not use the word conflict, but of this particular encounter between human habitat and elephant habitat. 246 00:25:47,130 --> 00:25:53,040 OK, so I want to talk very briefly about this herd of elephants that I was following with some biologists, 247 00:25:53,040 --> 00:25:57,300 which in light of the kind of infrastructural changes happening in the landscape, 248 00:25:57,300 --> 00:26:04,380 but also in terms of how these elephants were actually adapting to living in human habitation. 249 00:26:04,380 --> 00:26:12,600 This group, which we called full, led by this bull dusters bull, called Tara one named after a place called Tara Julie. 250 00:26:12,600 --> 00:26:18,930 They had formed a very novel association. This is a herd of four bulls, so generally bull elephants in India solitary. 251 00:26:18,930 --> 00:26:19,830 But increasingly, 252 00:26:19,830 --> 00:26:29,460 we're beginning to see the formation of these new configurations where bull elephants will will stick together and form fairly stable herds. 253 00:26:29,460 --> 00:26:35,490 This is actually an adaptive strategy of coping with risk played landscapes so they go and raid crops, 254 00:26:35,490 --> 00:26:44,820 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. 255 00:26:44,820 --> 00:26:51,570 And in fact, the youngest bull that you see there is called Tara for had over the time we observed that actually had to 256 00:26:51,570 --> 00:26:57,660 emulate from the older bull and had the the group had actually become experts at breaking into houses, 257 00:26:57,660 --> 00:27:02,520 doing it in a very, very clandestine kind of manner. Often, actually, they would do it, do it the next day. 258 00:27:02,520 --> 00:27:07,830 People wouldn't realise that the elephants had damaged, damaged their house. 259 00:27:07,830 --> 00:27:14,400 But in many ways, we can think of using sort of new apologies that are emerging in the plantation to seed. 260 00:27:14,400 --> 00:27:20,010 Because if you follow the tracks of these elephants and look at how they inhabit this landscape, 261 00:27:20,010 --> 00:27:25,590 most of their activity, which is diagrammed on the right, is actually outside protected areas. 262 00:27:25,590 --> 00:27:31,080 So in many ways, one can say following the tracks of these elephants, one witness is how they sort of unsettle humanness. 263 00:27:31,080 --> 00:27:36,240 Cartography is that the state and conservation organisations want to impose elephants 264 00:27:36,240 --> 00:27:40,870 specialised in their own ways along and against the grain of God got graphic design. 265 00:27:40,870 --> 00:27:43,050 And I think this becomes really, really important. 266 00:27:43,050 --> 00:27:49,050 When you think of the everyday encounters between people and elephants, such as the one you might see in this clip. 267 00:27:49,050 --> 00:28:00,770 This is a mock attack. And so is it just to give you an idea that far one in the lead? 268 00:28:00,770 --> 00:28:03,740 And that's that, do they're behind. 269 00:28:03,740 --> 00:28:14,510 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. 270 00:28:14,510 --> 00:28:21,320 Oh, so he's being told off in Assam is going to go away. 271 00:28:21,320 --> 00:28:32,770 Right, and he doesn't like it, but I would well. 272 00:28:32,770 --> 00:28:37,090 Are they in the notice of the elephants when elephants deal goes up? 273 00:28:37,090 --> 00:28:48,170 It's an indication that it is angry. Look, we got result. 274 00:28:48,170 --> 00:29:05,390 We don't. Oh, oh. 275 00:29:05,390 --> 00:29:10,910 Oh, I know. So it's showing a sign of retreat now. 276 00:29:10,910 --> 00:29:18,500 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. 277 00:29:18,500 --> 00:29:25,730 That's what I to do in some form of communication taking place. 278 00:29:25,730 --> 00:29:53,040 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. 279 00:29:53,040 --> 00:30:00,990 They have to stay awake all night. They take turns guarding the substance that we culture in the process. 280 00:30:00,990 --> 00:30:08,010 They exposed to malaria trypanosomiasis, other infectious diseases in the daytime. 281 00:30:08,010 --> 00:30:12,420 They're tired. The children take turns so they don't go to school, often school in villages. 282 00:30:12,420 --> 00:30:22,050 The problem as a result. The issue is also the fact that elephants can smell alcohol a kilometre and a half away. 283 00:30:22,050 --> 00:30:30,490 And many of them will crop guarding. They do often have a swig of rice wine, which is grown at home. 284 00:30:30,490 --> 00:30:39,010 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. 285 00:30:39,010 --> 00:30:43,220 We need to have the strength to be able to deal with it. 286 00:30:43,220 --> 00:30:47,890 And it's also very cold. And of course, they would like to have a sip. 287 00:30:47,890 --> 00:30:54,080 So that's the problem of having to guard the crop the night, particularly at night, 288 00:30:54,080 --> 00:30:58,810 because the elephant vision is far better than human vision at nine times. 289 00:30:58,810 --> 00:31:04,100 So now I think I would like to come to the story of one such person. 290 00:31:04,100 --> 00:31:08,710 And we had quite a few vineyards, but we don't have time to go into all of them. 291 00:31:08,710 --> 00:31:19,720 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. 292 00:31:19,720 --> 00:31:24,010 So that becomes important notice because you will remember that class hierarchy 293 00:31:24,010 --> 00:31:28,270 operates everywhere and you can track caste on almost any work you do in India. 294 00:31:28,270 --> 00:31:33,220 Caste is something that is a salient aspect of how things work out. 295 00:31:33,220 --> 00:31:41,770 So Ramu and his family live in a mud hut in the plantation with the elephant area. 296 00:31:41,770 --> 00:31:45,580 He lives there with his wife, his mother, his uncle, Anand Ramos. 297 00:31:45,580 --> 00:31:50,470 Dad works about 50 to 100 kilometres away, another tea plantation. 298 00:31:50,470 --> 00:31:54,850 What's important? Members of the tea plantation workers are temporary workers. 299 00:31:54,850 --> 00:32:00,220 They have hired on daily wages. They have no pension. They have no annual leave or sick leave. 300 00:32:00,220 --> 00:32:06,970 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. 301 00:32:06,970 --> 00:32:13,090 If you retire, the pension is nothing. These are temporary workers, daily workers, daily wages. 302 00:32:13,090 --> 00:32:21,940 The family is otherwise landless, the living at the edge of a corporate owned estate without any cultivable land of their own. 303 00:32:21,940 --> 00:32:26,980 They earn a living by working as temporary labourers in adjacent estates. 304 00:32:26,980 --> 00:32:30,280 Now that's when mining me actually had a dialogue and came across. 305 00:32:30,280 --> 00:32:38,140 Man was here at Oxford doing his research on human elephant conflict, and I was asking about what was happening in his head. 306 00:32:38,140 --> 00:32:44,350 The elephants were getting affected deeply in many ways, and I asked, Well, what has happened to the humans then? 307 00:32:44,350 --> 00:32:48,430 And that's when we realised that there's nothing being done to look at what's happened to the humans. 308 00:32:48,430 --> 00:32:55,570 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. 309 00:32:55,570 --> 00:33:00,190 So without any cultivable land of their own, they were living there. 310 00:33:00,190 --> 00:33:08,010 And what happened one night is this particular herd that you saw attacked Ramos hut. 311 00:33:08,010 --> 00:33:13,090 And all of them managed to get out and escape. 312 00:33:13,090 --> 00:33:19,930 The hut was demolished because the elephants have started now coming more and more for rice wine. 313 00:33:19,930 --> 00:33:29,200 It acquired a taste for the wine and a bag of wine is about 60 litres and so that one bag of 60 litres. 314 00:33:29,200 --> 00:33:34,300 They will then go and smash 10 to 12 huts, leaving at least eight to 10 widows times. 315 00:33:34,300 --> 00:33:42,530 Three children with nothing for them. Literally nothing. And that situation, when the family got out in the night, they ran out. 316 00:33:42,530 --> 00:33:47,060 The hut was demolished, but something tragic happened. 317 00:33:47,060 --> 00:33:53,780 There was a kerosene lamp inside the hut that fell over and within a few seconds 318 00:33:53,780 --> 00:33:58,910 the entire hut was set ablaze and everything was destroyed or the property, 319 00:33:58,910 --> 00:34:08,870 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, 320 00:34:08,870 --> 00:34:16,790 they felt quite humiliated, embarrassed in the gaze of the people around and the institutions and their bodies. 321 00:34:16,790 --> 00:34:24,560 But Ramu realised that he was actually a truck driver and his paper truck driving licence got burnt. 322 00:34:24,560 --> 00:34:35,420 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. 323 00:34:35,420 --> 00:34:44,560 Negotiations to the bureaucracies, the kickbacks and various things that have to take place to get a new truck driving licence is extremely hard. 324 00:34:44,560 --> 00:34:50,320 So after a while, they call the father back from the and said that he was working. 325 00:34:50,320 --> 00:34:53,950 He came back with his savings to build a new house is not enough, 326 00:34:53,950 --> 00:35:00,940 so they had to take money from the local money lenders at a steep interest rate to rebuild another mud house. 327 00:35:00,940 --> 00:35:05,770 But in the process, his father lost his job because it's a daily wage worker, so he's lost his job as well. 328 00:35:05,770 --> 00:35:11,580 So you can see this the the impact, and it's not a linear consequence of elephant attacks and things happening. 329 00:35:11,580 --> 00:35:15,760 There are multiple ripple effects nine in this whole process. 330 00:35:15,760 --> 00:35:23,830 Ramu then started the drawing and became increasingly quite sad. 331 00:35:23,830 --> 00:35:28,570 And this is the ethnographic narrative that came to months fieldwork, 332 00:35:28,570 --> 00:35:34,840 and we tracked down the details and we found that he started becoming suspicious of his wife, 333 00:35:34,840 --> 00:35:41,910 and he started believing that she was having an affair with someone in the village. 334 00:35:41,910 --> 00:35:49,530 And one day he took the family bicycle, which was saved and smashed that as the only form of transport. 335 00:35:49,530 --> 00:35:55,650 And sadly, we know that bicycle are no longer advertised on television in its Mercedes and Rolls-Royces. 336 00:35:55,650 --> 00:36:00,770 But that's an aside. What happened then was he gets. 337 00:36:00,770 --> 00:36:05,960 One thing he kept repeating, I want a job. He kept saying I got a job who would go around with the trucks, 338 00:36:05,960 --> 00:36:12,620 would wait the lorries and hang around there hoping that someone gave him a job because he wanted his truck driving licence. 339 00:36:12,620 --> 00:36:21,890 It's a lucrative job to drive lorries around the state over there, and someone gave him a job which was to unload lorries. 340 00:36:21,890 --> 00:36:26,840 On stationary drugs and one day when he was doing that, what during this period of time, 341 00:36:26,840 --> 00:36:32,810 [INAUDIBLE] to start consuming a lot more ganja and drinking alcohol. 342 00:36:32,810 --> 00:36:38,360 His wife was pregnant and one day he fell off. 343 00:36:38,360 --> 00:36:47,420 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 344 00:36:47,420 --> 00:36:53,480 mental health specialists and get him checked because things are not working out right. 345 00:36:53,480 --> 00:37:01,030 His behaviour has changed. He's got a family to look after. It's going to be a father and he's got know. 346 00:37:01,030 --> 00:37:13,150 Responsibilities. So they take Ramu to a local mental state hospital, and that's where I intervene as a psychiatrist to see what happens. 347 00:37:13,150 --> 00:37:18,850 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? 348 00:37:18,850 --> 00:37:23,950 No, no. The previous one. Yeah. Maybe I should have you read out to you. 349 00:37:23,950 --> 00:37:29,200 This is how a case load goes in outpatient endo case record the informant's name. 350 00:37:29,200 --> 00:37:34,000 The relation who comes with the informant is the mother. 351 00:37:34,000 --> 00:37:40,250 The duration of illness is sudden. The press leading cause is an acute event. 352 00:37:40,250 --> 00:37:48,380 And it begins with the narrative, which says he was present in a truck accident, a truck accident where he was a helper. 353 00:37:48,380 --> 00:37:57,620 However, not much heard one month ago. But remember the events that took place with the hurt and the attack was six months ago? 354 00:37:57,620 --> 00:38:06,030 Prior to this? And then the list of complaints about darned disorganised behaviour for the past 20 days. 355 00:38:06,030 --> 00:38:16,440 Consisting of wandering away from home at midnight, dressing and undressing repeatedly without any reason, Mick curating in front of others, 356 00:38:16,440 --> 00:38:25,440 which is being in front of others suspicious of others, particularly wife muttering, 357 00:38:25,440 --> 00:38:31,590 self muttering, spontaneous laughing and crying, talking with hands and moments in the air. 358 00:38:31,590 --> 00:38:39,600 Hallucinatory behaviour in bracketed poly substance abuse, ganja alcohol, tobacco, the amount has been put down. 359 00:38:39,600 --> 00:38:48,030 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, 360 00:38:48,030 --> 00:38:55,740 an indication of what the matter is there has to be some factual evidence provided is a statement recorded here in Hindi, 361 00:38:55,740 --> 00:39:02,720 which says may happen quickly as whole, which means I have come here for a job. 362 00:39:02,720 --> 00:39:12,620 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. 363 00:39:12,620 --> 00:39:20,270 Psychiatry operates, but maybe to accelerate and because it should be having time if you go to the next slide, 364 00:39:20,270 --> 00:39:25,820 I want to show you what we observe based upon comparing it with the ethnographic narrative here. 365 00:39:25,820 --> 00:39:30,230 First of all, it really frames a cultural narrative into an organic one. 366 00:39:30,230 --> 00:39:36,530 It starts with a head injury and a fall, and it shrinks. 367 00:39:36,530 --> 00:39:42,680 Spatial and temporal events, the history shrunk to 20 days or two a month, starting with the fall. 368 00:39:42,680 --> 00:39:48,680 Following that, it inverts the language of suffering to see that he is obviously searching for a job. 369 00:39:48,680 --> 00:39:54,470 He's wanting a job but is put down there as an example of irrelevant talk. 370 00:39:54,470 --> 00:39:59,000 And then what it does is the result is a big decontextualised the symptoms. 371 00:39:59,000 --> 00:40:04,910 There's no story there at all. These are just symptoms, whether it is lack of sleep or losing appetite. 372 00:40:04,910 --> 00:40:12,260 But as I think connecting any of that. And so inspired at that time by Murakami short story The Elephant Vanishes. 373 00:40:12,260 --> 00:40:18,080 We thought that it's such a huge elephant which that that it just vanished from, the case notes. 374 00:40:18,080 --> 00:40:24,230 There is no no mention of this elephant anywhere. Would it go back to the doctors and talk to them? 375 00:40:24,230 --> 00:40:28,790 And that's another story which would go up in the discussions of what they said when we told them the actual story. 376 00:40:28,790 --> 00:40:35,180 But the next bit on the second case note is Ramu was prescribed antipsychotics. 377 00:40:35,180 --> 00:40:40,220 He was diagnosis of a from an acute because of any form psychosis and poly substance abuse. 378 00:40:40,220 --> 00:40:44,990 He was given antipsychotics and usually come back with his mother a month later. 379 00:40:44,990 --> 00:40:50,730 The medications are free. They are run by the government, the state government, and that's available. 380 00:40:50,730 --> 00:40:55,100 So they did get the medication they gave back. Then notices comes with the mother. 381 00:40:55,100 --> 00:41:03,170 According to her, the patient is much better than before. No fresh complaints, however, irrelevant doc continues. 382 00:41:03,170 --> 00:41:10,470 So that doc, which is about a desire to want a job that is continuing, is again an indication that the illness persists. 383 00:41:10,470 --> 00:41:18,380 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. 384 00:41:18,380 --> 00:41:24,110 These are powerful medications. Antipsychotics go into all sorts of parts of the body, including your brain receptors. 385 00:41:24,110 --> 00:41:29,540 They have side effects. Now we know they cause metabolic syndrome, SCO's diabetes, cardiovascular conditions. 386 00:41:29,540 --> 00:41:34,700 I prescribe medications on the streets and I am very wary about what happens when they do that. 387 00:41:34,700 --> 00:41:39,620 They do help and I'm not taking extreme positions, but I'm just trying to contextualise it. 388 00:41:39,620 --> 00:41:44,720 So, yeah, this is Romney's story about what happened. 389 00:41:44,720 --> 00:41:49,880 So going back then to, you know, this sort of fissure landscapes that people inhabit. 390 00:41:49,880 --> 00:41:55,310 So when I was guarding crops with people, they often said that they had to do labour, 391 00:41:55,310 --> 00:42:01,260 gardening crops at night and then again working in the fields in the day. This generated considerable opportunity costs. 392 00:42:01,260 --> 00:42:07,130 The two boys who got was in the same shelter where I was in dropped out of 393 00:42:07,130 --> 00:42:12,200 school because having to support the family was becoming too onerous otherwise. 394 00:42:12,200 --> 00:42:18,380 But gardening crops also generates fatigue. We cope with this through alcohol, a farmer told me. 395 00:42:18,380 --> 00:42:22,640 Not only can you endure, but it gives you the courage to meet elephants at night. 396 00:42:22,640 --> 00:42:27,530 You are from a place with electricity, he tells me. You don't know how elephants move at night. 397 00:42:27,530 --> 00:42:35,660 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, 398 00:42:35,660 --> 00:42:43,280 armed with only a torch and a few firecrackers. But there's way more going on in the sort of political ecology. 399 00:42:43,280 --> 00:42:51,980 For instance, alcohol enters the sort of political ecology will be a range of other molecular relations that live elephants get attracted to alcohol. 400 00:42:51,980 --> 00:42:57,620 So in the wild elephants like consuming fruit like durian and marula. 401 00:42:57,620 --> 00:43:04,160 Those of you who know the alcohol model, it's got an elephant on the cover. 402 00:43:04,160 --> 00:43:12,050 But fermented molasses where people were brewing alcohol at home can be sensible by highly macro asthmatic creatures like elephants for miles. 403 00:43:12,050 --> 00:43:18,260 And in fact, WWF printed these two posters and circulated them in the villages, 404 00:43:18,260 --> 00:43:24,110 saying Don't brew alcohol at home, because what happens otherwise is that elephants will come and break in. 405 00:43:24,110 --> 00:43:26,450 But there's again, another kind of colonial history to it, 406 00:43:26,450 --> 00:43:34,880 because this alcohol generation is deemed as illicit because of the colonial policy of the abacavir, the excise tax. 407 00:43:34,880 --> 00:43:39,830 So therefore, elephant incursions can also generate excise ways into the villages. 408 00:43:39,830 --> 00:43:43,580 Therefore, many people, in fact, were brewing alcohol not in their homes, 409 00:43:43,580 --> 00:43:48,980 but actually in their fields to kind of make sure that elephants were not not coming in. 410 00:43:48,980 --> 00:43:54,380 But the elephant also gets and enrolled into the sort of political ecology in many other ways. 411 00:43:54,380 --> 00:43:57,200 So some some of the tea plantations were fairly recent, 412 00:43:57,200 --> 00:44:03,530 and land conversions happened because human elephant conflict had escalated because of a nearby oil refinery. 413 00:44:03,530 --> 00:44:08,510 The deforestation triggered by this mega infrastructure project led to greater elephant 414 00:44:08,510 --> 00:44:13,190 incursions and therefore people abandoning or selling of their land for conversion into tea. 415 00:44:13,190 --> 00:44:19,880 And here you might note that elephants don't consume tea. So what happens is that when you convert land into deep plantations, 416 00:44:19,880 --> 00:44:24,620 this escalates the conflict even more because they're foraging, grounds get reduced. 417 00:44:24,620 --> 00:44:30,590 But once I was doing fieldwork, a huge drain was being dug between the forest and the tea plantation. 418 00:44:30,590 --> 00:44:36,560 The owner of the estate had strategically left gaps in in the drain, which. 419 00:44:36,560 --> 00:44:44,510 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, 420 00:44:44,510 --> 00:44:52,190 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. 421 00:44:52,190 --> 00:44:59,600 So this is what one could call accumulation by plantation, you know, kind of as a play on the idea of accumulation by dispossession. 422 00:44:59,600 --> 00:45:06,680 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? 423 00:45:06,680 --> 00:45:18,930 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. 424 00:45:18,930 --> 00:45:26,340 It no way belies the dedication and hard work which is being carried out by extremely dedicated medical professionals who are out there, 425 00:45:26,340 --> 00:45:35,910 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 426 00:45:35,910 --> 00:45:43,560 can backfire so easily by extracting just what we wish you to convey a point. 427 00:45:43,560 --> 00:45:50,520 But you know, we consider both of them as necessary how well we did so much of the work. 428 00:45:50,520 --> 00:45:59,640 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. 429 00:45:59,640 --> 00:46:02,160 What are the ethical concerns and issues? 430 00:46:02,160 --> 00:46:08,010 And for us, the question was, you know, eliciting these narratives, this is a gift of imagination of their suffering. 431 00:46:08,010 --> 00:46:12,030 Give it to us, what do we do with it? We hear them. 432 00:46:12,030 --> 00:46:16,050 We publish it. We come here and give a seminar. What else can we do? 433 00:46:16,050 --> 00:46:21,210 The two ladies here whose permission I have, they're both widows. They're both ready for the compensation. 434 00:46:21,210 --> 00:46:27,090 Because if you can prove that your husband died of an elephant fatality, you get one hundred thousand rupees, 435 00:46:27,090 --> 00:46:34,470 but you actually only get twenty thousand because twenty thousand is a kickback to the post-mortem department, 436 00:46:34,470 --> 00:46:39,660 who has issued a certificate to say that the man died of an elephant attack. 437 00:46:39,660 --> 00:46:46,980 Another twenty thousand is 50 miles in the opposite direction by bus to the forest department to put in a written application to get 438 00:46:46,980 --> 00:46:56,760 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, 439 00:46:56,760 --> 00:47:03,570 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. 440 00:47:03,570 --> 00:47:07,920 So then you come home and then the kids are waiting in the village of Mommy's come home. 441 00:47:07,920 --> 00:47:10,200 It's going to bring something for them, some sweets for them. 442 00:47:10,200 --> 00:47:15,930 So there's a whole lot of that transaction that goes on if they have to go out to carry out this compensation business. 443 00:47:15,930 --> 00:47:20,010 So these two are still waiting to women. They do widows. 444 00:47:20,010 --> 00:47:24,990 And mind you, they clinically speaking the vote suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. 445 00:47:24,990 --> 00:47:26,760 They both have severe social phobia. 446 00:47:26,760 --> 00:47:33,900 At night, the moment they hear sound, they go on the on the ground holding, clutching their children and lie still. 447 00:47:33,900 --> 00:47:40,650 This is a regular feature because they're living in that area, which is actually elephant territory. 448 00:47:40,650 --> 00:47:46,440 So this is daily living at night and a day. They are living in pain, suffering and fear. 449 00:47:46,440 --> 00:47:57,090 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. 450 00:47:57,090 --> 00:48:00,840 They said, You know, whenever there's an elephant in fidelity, everyone comes here. 451 00:48:00,840 --> 00:48:04,860 Many of the journalists and they mentioned to me when time magazine photographers come, 452 00:48:04,860 --> 00:48:08,730 they take photographs to give us one kilogram of rice and they go away. And that's it. 453 00:48:08,730 --> 00:48:13,530 No one ever bothered to come back. No government official comes. No photographers, no scientist. 454 00:48:13,530 --> 00:48:16,920 No one comes back again. And that's how it is. 455 00:48:16,920 --> 00:48:24,360 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. 456 00:48:24,360 --> 00:48:28,710 So that that's an equal, an asymmetric gift exchange, really speaking. 457 00:48:28,710 --> 00:48:33,900 So what we did was we took these ethnographic accounts and we translated that 458 00:48:33,900 --> 00:48:38,460 into local assemblies and gave them a written history of what has happened. 459 00:48:38,460 --> 00:48:44,100 Because tomorrow these girls, these young girls, are going to grow up and ask their mother what happened to our father? 460 00:48:44,100 --> 00:48:47,490 They need to know the history of how state violence, 461 00:48:47,490 --> 00:48:57,400 inequalities and spaces that generate these toxic landscapes have had an impact on why and how their fathers died. 462 00:48:57,400 --> 00:49:03,250 And that's the least we can give, perhaps in return to them that they have a written history now available. 463 00:49:03,250 --> 00:49:14,440 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? 464 00:49:14,440 --> 00:49:19,000 Not for our own purpose instead of being displayed in a rage like rabbits. 465 00:49:19,000 --> 00:49:23,470 It is better to die. It seems that we are just occupying space. 466 00:49:23,470 --> 00:49:30,700 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. 467 00:49:30,700 --> 00:49:35,590 This will carry on. The man will be man. Animal will be animal till such time. 468 00:49:35,590 --> 00:49:39,490 This will carry on till we are alive. We must carry on like this. 469 00:49:39,490 --> 00:49:45,250 Human numbers will increase. You cannot take humans and put them somewhere and elephants. 470 00:49:45,250 --> 00:49:51,610 You cannot chase and put them somewhere. That's the way in which they articulated the problem. 471 00:49:51,610 --> 00:49:59,860 And if we trace the vectors back, perhaps in the discussion, we might bring up how these vectors can be tracked back to deforestation, 472 00:49:59,860 --> 00:50:05,350 large scale wood chopping and ways of wood going and where these tables coming from. 473 00:50:05,350 --> 00:50:10,420 And that's when we start looking at these vectors invariably end up with international treaties, 474 00:50:10,420 --> 00:50:18,580 get alliances and compliances with more international bodies of proxies for global institutions like the WTO, like many other bodies. 475 00:50:18,580 --> 00:50:22,690 So compliance is not just people taking treatment from doctors, but compliance. 476 00:50:22,690 --> 00:50:28,410 Work backwards is complying with these international bodies and regulations and policies by the state. 477 00:50:28,410 --> 00:50:36,550 Maybe we will have more discussions on this later if we talk about how the state is caught in this very difficult situation. 478 00:50:36,550 --> 00:50:43,270 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, 479 00:50:43,270 --> 00:50:49,450 it's got to do with histories of labour, dislocation dispossession, but also the ecology of non-humans. 480 00:50:49,450 --> 00:50:55,030 These are affective mythologies or affective ecologies. Can we think about distress and animals? 481 00:50:55,030 --> 00:50:58,480 Can we think about, you know, the mental states of elephants? 482 00:50:58,480 --> 00:51:07,000 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? 483 00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:13,420 But there's also this whole question about conservation the perpetuation of colonial logics and the enrolment of elephants 484 00:51:13,420 --> 00:51:20,350 to actually further dispossession bid by the state or be it through this sort of logic of the accumulation by plantation. 485 00:51:20,350 --> 00:51:24,460 But in many ways, just this part of the dialogue doesn't help because, you know, 486 00:51:24,460 --> 00:51:30,850 mental health dimensions get obscured, largely because conservation and a psychologist, we often focus on the visible. 487 00:51:30,850 --> 00:51:36,430 And I think you're looking at the ecology of mental health to become really important. 488 00:51:36,430 --> 00:51:40,510 And so that's really a summary diagram to see how alcohol is a mediator. 489 00:51:40,510 --> 00:51:48,940 One of the mediators of the supposed conflict between humans will end up with poor mental health as a result of not just alcohol, 490 00:51:48,940 --> 00:51:52,570 but alcohol is now being deemed illicit for them. This is not illicit alcohol. 491 00:51:52,570 --> 00:51:58,720 This is home grown rice wine, but the state alcohol that is sold is is licenced alcohol. 492 00:51:58,720 --> 00:52:03,970 That's OK to buy. That whisky is okay for the rich to buy the beers, OK for us to buy. 493 00:52:03,970 --> 00:52:12,850 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. 494 00:52:12,850 --> 00:52:20,980 They're now criminalised. They're called co-operators. In the conservation literature, there's morbidity in retaliation and fatality, 495 00:52:20,980 --> 00:52:28,450 the psychotic morbidity that I showed you to one such case load and the clinical gains that addicts out local suffering, 496 00:52:28,450 --> 00:52:35,850 which makes it even more difficult to understand what is going on and how do we address this problem? 497 00:52:35,850 --> 00:52:41,850 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, 498 00:52:41,850 --> 00:52:50,310 effects like culling have deep bearings because elephants have long term memory, they have deep bearings on socialisation and so on and so forth. 499 00:52:50,310 --> 00:52:55,590 So one can think, whether in the sort of visual landscape of this mining going on where there's conflict, 500 00:52:55,590 --> 00:53:01,410 you know, the elephants are being chased from one part to another. Do they start to embody a certain kind of morbidity? 501 00:53:01,410 --> 00:53:07,230 And is the response is this question of seeking alcohol in some ways a response to this morbidity? 502 00:53:07,230 --> 00:53:11,160 I mean, it's partly speculative, but is something that we shouldn't entirely rule out. 503 00:53:11,160 --> 00:53:23,130 Yeah, I just saw in connexion with that man and me visited the elephant training centre, where wild elephants are domesticated for tourism. 504 00:53:23,130 --> 00:53:31,470 And they are these baby elephants who are whipped and beaten day in and day out every day by the future mahout, 505 00:53:31,470 --> 00:53:38,310 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. 506 00:53:38,310 --> 00:53:43,890 You can't change about, so you have to beat the baby elephant for a long, 507 00:53:43,890 --> 00:53:49,860 long time till you instilled so much fear into it that it will listen to anything you do. 508 00:53:49,860 --> 00:53:55,560 And that's how the training takes place, and the whipping and the beating causes wounds and injuries, 509 00:53:55,560 --> 00:53:58,830 which the potential moms themselves feel so guilty at night. 510 00:53:58,830 --> 00:54:02,490 Not replied turmeric. And look after these baby elephants as well. 511 00:54:02,490 --> 00:54:06,690 And that night, that guilt drives them to drinking huge amounts of vodka, 512 00:54:06,690 --> 00:54:11,790 which then makes the whole situation of alcohol as a currency actually far more pervasive than it. 513 00:54:11,790 --> 00:54:18,060 From what I understand now, these elephant training camps have now stopped, and some of them did not completely stopped. 514 00:54:18,060 --> 00:54:19,950 But they still they are still quite a few. 515 00:54:19,950 --> 00:54:26,490 So I think this is about how domestication and tourism is connected with the kind of violence that we don't see. 516 00:54:26,490 --> 00:54:32,930 But you would notice when if you were to elicit a biography of a mouth or the making of a mild. 517 00:54:32,930 --> 00:54:42,580 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, 518 00:54:42,580 --> 00:54:49,300 you know, fall irrelevant, talk muttering, make gyrating suspicions of someone. 519 00:54:49,300 --> 00:54:51,670 These are what we call the skeletal narratives. 520 00:54:51,670 --> 00:54:57,850 But these Celtel narratives are what is taking place in mental health across the world, not just in India, but everywhere. 521 00:54:57,850 --> 00:55:00,820 We take on lists of symptoms and what the duration is. 522 00:55:00,820 --> 00:55:11,230 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. 523 00:55:11,230 --> 00:55:17,080 And this is important for us because as we're getting prioritised as this case, nodes are being adopted. 524 00:55:17,080 --> 00:55:21,490 Pardon the pun, as they go to the insurance companies, as they're being read, 525 00:55:21,490 --> 00:55:29,560 there is an issue where the debate Damien Panopticon as evidence is turning into a pan lexicon. 526 00:55:29,560 --> 00:55:36,430 That's my neologism. But I think once you this enters the written word they go through from one case notes, 527 00:55:36,430 --> 00:55:42,340 and the repeated cut and paste said, every time you go for a follow up to your GP or your psychiatrist. 528 00:55:42,340 --> 00:55:47,500 This is happening here as well as in other parts because you just can't repeat and paste. 529 00:55:47,500 --> 00:55:51,550 And a new narrative is being a stranger is created in your case notes. 530 00:55:51,550 --> 00:55:57,430 So for a long time, there was a project of reading for health professionals that you read and you acquire knowledge. 531 00:55:57,430 --> 00:56:04,180 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? 532 00:56:04,180 --> 00:56:10,990 And which is why I felt this clinical gaze has a certain violence and inherent in that. 533 00:56:10,990 --> 00:56:18,070 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. 534 00:56:18,070 --> 00:56:25,360 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. 535 00:56:25,360 --> 00:56:28,330 And social suffering is then edited out. 536 00:56:28,330 --> 00:56:37,300 But then what also happens is that people are dislocated and disconnected to that process of writing and experience that in many different ways. 537 00:56:37,300 --> 00:56:39,340 Ali Baba coined the term on home, 538 00:56:39,340 --> 00:56:46,570 which is when a series of social and political processes around you where you at home start making you feel not at home anymore. 539 00:56:46,570 --> 00:56:54,760 I feel that way these days as I crisscross between these deep ends of parties to parts of India and the homeless in London, 540 00:56:54,760 --> 00:57:01,210 who are rising in vast numbers and percentages of getting high and high and resources being depleted. 541 00:57:01,210 --> 00:57:06,190 And so this is to say that this is how perhaps the global race is ecologies. 542 00:57:06,190 --> 00:57:09,400 We deliberately didn't want to use the word local because that gets us into a 543 00:57:09,400 --> 00:57:14,230 dichotomy which really takes us nowhere by saying the global and the local. 544 00:57:14,230 --> 00:57:21,190 And that just puts the thing. But we wanted to suggest that the global actually erases ecologies to its 545 00:57:21,190 --> 00:57:26,440 particular set of statements and policies that are now going round the world. 546 00:57:26,440 --> 00:57:34,000 Because randomised controlled trials have shown that our cities have shown that antidepressants and cognitive therapy is the answer for depression. 547 00:57:34,000 --> 00:57:37,390 So scale it up, just give more of it, give have more resources. 548 00:57:37,390 --> 00:57:42,340 Have more psychologists have wanted the prisons let them be manufactured in plants in Germany or UK? 549 00:57:42,340 --> 00:57:46,780 Export them as much as you can copy them in Brazil and India and give and feed them. 550 00:57:46,780 --> 00:57:52,740 And they wanted the brains of fishes and and everything around us. So that is why I felt ecologies. 551 00:57:52,740 --> 00:57:57,360 We both felt that this was a better term than contrasting it with the local. 552 00:57:57,360 --> 00:58:01,380 Just before we sum up, so this is some of the new work that we've been doing, 553 00:58:01,380 --> 00:58:06,120 looking at inner well-being in Delhi and looking at relations between people in 554 00:58:06,120 --> 00:58:10,750 macaques and how actually the public feeding of monkeys becomes a very important point. 555 00:58:10,750 --> 00:58:19,770 Important conduit through which mental well-being is enacted and that too in public spaces and the behaviour of these macaques are also changing. 556 00:58:19,770 --> 00:58:21,930 Some of the work we've done with Thomas Cousins here, 557 00:58:21,930 --> 00:58:29,250 as well as the Why project and actually how macaque behaviour is changing in these cities to gain access to this kind of food. 558 00:58:29,250 --> 00:58:33,780 So this is very much ongoing work, but we just end with this one slide. 559 00:58:33,780 --> 00:58:37,920 I think this last slide is just very telling because this is my work in the streets. 560 00:58:37,920 --> 00:58:44,640 I work a lot with churches because the church provides coffee and a place for the homeless shelters and clean up. 561 00:58:44,640 --> 00:58:50,160 There's nowhere to go and it shuts in the evenings and the bar after evening to look after yourself. 562 00:58:50,160 --> 00:58:55,140 And women particularly are vulnerable. You have to trade your body off for a whole range of things. 563 00:58:55,140 --> 00:58:59,190 Each human body is about 20000 pounds per year. 564 00:58:59,190 --> 00:59:05,190 For those who own you, they're gangsters around their large networks who force them, 565 00:59:05,190 --> 00:59:11,100 in particular to do things carrying white powder for the boys in the city on Friday evenings to deliver, 566 00:59:11,100 --> 00:59:14,790 as well as prostituting, pimping and all sorts of things. 567 00:59:14,790 --> 00:59:20,190 But when you when I when I see this church, I go in there to see people and talk with them. 568 00:59:20,190 --> 00:59:25,020 You notice that outside the two therapists, and they're full of spikes. 569 00:59:25,020 --> 00:59:32,370 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. 570 00:59:32,370 --> 00:59:36,480 And you can see how that hostile architecture is also now being enacted with elephants. 571 00:59:36,480 --> 00:59:45,060 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, 572 00:59:45,060 --> 00:59:49,320 but there's something inside us that is threatening us as well. But that's another part. 573 00:59:49,320 --> 00:59:54,450 The middle photograph is a man who's in a very, very wet silk duvet. 574 00:59:54,450 --> 01:00:02,880 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, 575 01:00:02,880 --> 01:00:07,650 the billionaires who work in the stock exchange and investment companies. 576 01:00:07,650 --> 01:00:14,700 He is a gentleman who's come from Ireland all the way. If you track his story, it connects you straight to the Vatican. 577 01:00:14,700 --> 01:00:23,710 And that's shocking. How is it possible that a homeless man and a wet, soggy duvet there lying there? 578 01:00:23,710 --> 01:00:33,820 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. 579 01:00:33,820 --> 01:00:41,560 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. 580 01:00:41,560 --> 01:00:45,610 And I wanted to contrast that with the fences reproducing, producing. 581 01:00:45,610 --> 01:00:49,030 So now in Camden, for example, like these fences over here? 582 01:00:49,030 --> 01:00:54,690 Marks and Spencer have fitted alarms not to drive away those who want to steal these alarms. 583 01:00:54,690 --> 01:00:59,890 Only if you go to sleep. They go off. So the city will not let you sleep. 584 01:00:59,890 --> 01:01:04,660 And so that's the situation we are in over here. I mean, we should probably finish this. 585 01:01:04,660 --> 01:01:08,920 Anything else that you want to add to that? So I just want to bring you back to London. 586 01:01:08,920 --> 01:01:15,220 But also to say that this issue about London and the case note is not just to India alone. 587 01:01:15,220 --> 01:01:19,570 These are stock phrases from case notes of an intensive psychiatric care unit 588 01:01:19,570 --> 01:01:24,280 where I worked in Adelaide and I extracted these notes to show you how again, 589 01:01:24,280 --> 01:01:27,280 doctors write about a black Afro-Caribbean patient. 590 01:01:27,280 --> 01:01:34,600 So race enters in here in a very different way, but is important diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, not engaging with the community mental health. 591 01:01:34,600 --> 01:01:39,310 The noncompliant with this medication not picked a prescription from the GP. 592 01:01:39,310 --> 01:01:44,080 Hostile, hostile and aggressive make threats to kill noncompliant. 593 01:01:44,080 --> 01:01:48,100 Expressing paranoid ideas about his psychiatrist refuses to remain informal. 594 01:01:48,100 --> 01:01:51,610 No management problems is vague of many, but this. 595 01:01:51,610 --> 01:01:55,660 This is why I call the band lexicon that this is nurses were writing this. 596 01:01:55,660 --> 01:02:04,000 So when that doctors writing spreads out naturally to nurses, to psychologists, social workers, it becomes a powerful lexicon. 597 01:02:04,000 --> 01:02:14,170 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. 598 01:02:14,170 --> 01:02:19,630 And that is why we developed techniques and ways to which we can dialogue and alternative ways. 599 01:02:19,630 --> 01:02:23,290 Perhaps some of the day, if we were to continue to develop this, 600 01:02:23,290 --> 01:02:45,056 we might come and share some of the work and how we might work in alternate ways to to engage with people.