1 00:00:08,080 --> 00:00:14,590 Thank you, Faisal, thank you for inviting me to this, thank you to Pamela and also and really enjoyed last yesterday. 2 00:00:14,590 --> 00:00:19,340 I don't know how much of my publication in four has actually got into the booklet that you have. 3 00:00:19,340 --> 00:00:28,630 So just wanted to say this is from a book I'm finishing. It's called Unseen City, the psychic life of Poverty in Mumbai, London and New York, 4 00:00:28,630 --> 00:00:34,150 and my interest in psychoanalysis goes back to like studies to my doctoral dissertation 5 00:00:34,150 --> 00:00:38,320 where I wrote about the history of hysteria in Victorian literature and culture. 6 00:00:38,320 --> 00:00:42,760 And I kind of, you know, just kind of like you really ran away from it in between. 7 00:00:42,760 --> 00:00:47,830 I wrote a book in 2014 which had not a line of psychoanalysis in it. 8 00:00:47,830 --> 00:00:54,820 And this book is kind of, in a way, trying to figure out why I ran away from psychoanalysis and what would kind of, in a way, make me stay. 9 00:00:54,820 --> 00:00:59,260 So this is kind of this is it. I'll read from a paper just in the interest of time. 10 00:00:59,260 --> 00:01:08,680 Otherwise I'll really go over. You know, when you're finishing a book, this is kind of really trying to you 100000 words in 20 minutes. 11 00:01:08,680 --> 00:01:15,540 So, yes. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968, 12 00:01:15,540 --> 00:01:26,070 the Brazilian educationist frame rate turns his attention to what he calls the culture of silence of the dispossessed in the years immediately before, 13 00:01:26,070 --> 00:01:31,260 Freddy, who is professor of history and philosophy of education at the University of Helsinki, 14 00:01:31,260 --> 00:01:36,090 had conducted his early experiments with the teaching of illiterate populations, 15 00:01:36,090 --> 00:01:44,580 an initiative that was considered so radical that he was imprisoned for 70 days after the military coup of 1964. 16 00:01:44,580 --> 00:01:52,620 So Freddy left for Chile soon after his release, working with UNESCO's and the Chilean Institute of Agrarian Reform and Pedagogy of the 17 00:01:52,620 --> 00:01:58,980 Oppressed was published during his this time this decade long exile from Brazil for free. 18 00:01:58,980 --> 00:02:03,030 The world is not a given reality, but a problem to be worked on. 19 00:02:03,030 --> 00:02:09,150 The human inhabitants of this world have the ontological vocation, he says, to be a subject. 20 00:02:09,150 --> 00:02:14,670 Education can either be coercive, forcing younger generations to conform to the status quo, 21 00:02:14,670 --> 00:02:23,650 or it can be the practise of freedom, fostering creativity, criticality and liberation. 22 00:02:23,650 --> 00:02:31,960 Archaeological definitions of humanisation must take into account what Frey records ontological possibility and the 23 00:02:31,960 --> 00:02:41,500 historical reality of dehumanisation and dehumanisation concerns not only those whose humanity has been stolen or stunted, 24 00:02:41,500 --> 00:02:50,480 but also the perpetrators guilty of what Frederick calls the distortion of the vocation of becoming fully human. 25 00:02:50,480 --> 00:02:56,300 It is dehumanisation which leads the oppressed to struggle for the emancipation of labour. 26 00:02:56,300 --> 00:03:03,680 But Freddy sort of, you know, warns against, you know, pressers the oppressed, becoming oppressors of oppressors. 27 00:03:03,680 --> 00:03:12,710 He warns also, and this is again a point about benign paternalism I brought up in my response to Qoo10 Man's talk yesterday. 28 00:03:12,710 --> 00:03:18,200 He warns also against four acts of charity. You know, he sees that can they can. 29 00:03:18,200 --> 00:03:20,720 They can, they can tap into false charity. 30 00:03:20,720 --> 00:03:29,960 So this an interesting quote from the book True generosity lies in striving so that these hands, whether of individuals or entire people's, 31 00:03:29,960 --> 00:03:40,550 need to be extended less and less in supplication, and so that more and more they become human hands, which work and working transform the world. 32 00:03:40,550 --> 00:03:48,050 So there are two sort of, you know, insights that I take away from this study that the lesson an apprenticeship for true generosity 33 00:03:48,050 --> 00:03:53,810 must come from the oppressed themselves and that the oppressed will not gain this by chance, 34 00:03:53,810 --> 00:03:58,640 but through the praxis of their quest for it. So Fred, is you. 35 00:03:58,640 --> 00:04:06,560 Pedagogy of the oppressed is a pedagogy that is forged with not for the oppressed. 36 00:04:06,560 --> 00:04:09,650 The problem, however, is this and really puts those himself. 37 00:04:09,650 --> 00:04:17,840 How can the oppressed as divided inauthentic beings participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? 38 00:04:17,840 --> 00:04:23,720 So, you know, how can the depersonalised the colonised the subjugated race, whom Albert said, 39 00:04:23,720 --> 00:04:28,160 you know, had characterised as bearing the mark of the plural, then have a singular? 40 00:04:28,160 --> 00:04:32,690 How can how can these people inaugurate libertarian praxis? 41 00:04:32,690 --> 00:04:40,880 How are the masses to reinstate individual rights and collective freedom, all the while restoring the oppressors humanity? 42 00:04:40,880 --> 00:04:51,180 So the times that Fraidy invokes in this context are critical and liberating dialogue reflective participation of the oppressed. 43 00:04:51,180 --> 00:05:00,900 He insists that this is not merely armchair revolution, but a call to action, one which has trust in the oppressed and in their ability to reason. 44 00:05:00,900 --> 00:05:11,590 Revolutionary leadership mobilised within and across class lines must be dialogic, he says, and quote intentional. 45 00:05:11,590 --> 00:05:14,050 Save for Friday, political action is pedagogical. 46 00:05:14,050 --> 00:05:21,010 My current book ventures another modality the psychoanalytical I mean, I must warn that it begins with psychoanalysis, 47 00:05:21,010 --> 00:05:26,980 but where I end is like, really, you know, talking shop, but talking the talking cure, it's not really psychoanalysis anymore. 48 00:05:26,980 --> 00:05:31,840 So this kind of emancipatory action, not for but with the oppressed. 49 00:05:31,840 --> 00:05:40,060 When we think of psychoanalysis, however, in the race of in the context of race and class, we are likely to be staggered by the lack of intersection. 50 00:05:40,060 --> 00:05:44,740 We are likely to be staggered by the lack of committed involvement and other sort of human freedom. 51 00:05:44,740 --> 00:05:51,340 I'm sorry, I'm really encouraged into quoting Friday because you essentially said, you know, one of his heroes was Freddie and Fannie on it, as I did. 52 00:05:51,340 --> 00:05:54,670 I really found so many of these relevant to my dog today. 53 00:05:54,670 --> 00:06:01,870 So valorise in processes of sovereignty and liberal democracy in the West, Freud himself had written in civilisation and its discontents, 54 00:06:01,870 --> 00:06:07,420 as published in 1930, that in an individual of neurosis, we take as our starting point. 55 00:06:07,420 --> 00:06:10,870 The contrast that distinguishes the patient from his environment, 56 00:06:10,870 --> 00:06:18,040 which is assumed to be normal for a group all of whose members are affected by one and the same disorder. 57 00:06:18,040 --> 00:06:23,680 So let's say poverty, let's say colonisation. No such background could exist. 58 00:06:23,680 --> 00:06:31,510 So this doesn't give give rise to the sort of normal logical claim that the primitive or the socially objected do not have an unconscious, 59 00:06:31,510 --> 00:06:37,720 the other unconscious. In fact, Freud says the content of the unconscious is very controversial. 60 00:06:37,720 --> 00:06:43,990 Statement can be compared with an Aboriginal population of the mind. 61 00:06:43,990 --> 00:06:48,730 So the preferred preferred trajectory of individuation, as we call it in psychoanalysis, 62 00:06:48,730 --> 00:06:55,550 is from group to self, a Salford that is based on the exclusion of the group. 63 00:06:55,550 --> 00:06:59,870 And Dark Continents study of the colonial genealogy of psychoanalysis, 64 00:06:59,870 --> 00:07:11,120 Ranjana Nakano has outlined Freud's use of what she calls the evolutionary progressive model to describe how the anthropological object becomes 65 00:07:11,120 --> 00:07:21,170 the historical subject in psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis is the symptom and mechanism of the creation of the European sovereign subject. 66 00:07:21,170 --> 00:07:26,990 She calls it the calm violence of interpolation by which a social contract is formed, 67 00:07:26,990 --> 00:07:38,230 that both individuals as members of a group at the same time as it confers upon them the culture or civilisation these group entities. 68 00:07:38,230 --> 00:07:42,460 In an article titled Poverty and Psychoanalysis The Poverty of Psychoanalysis, 69 00:07:42,460 --> 00:07:50,020 Manasi Kumar points out that there is an abundance of metaphoric appropriations of poverty in psychoanalytic literature. 70 00:07:50,020 --> 00:07:53,740 So you have poverty of ego, poverty of symptomatology, poverty of experience, 71 00:07:53,740 --> 00:07:59,560 the psychological poverty of groups of very famous quote from civilisation and discontents, 72 00:07:59,560 --> 00:08:04,270 voluntary poverty, disease and Freud's concept, the psychological poverty of philosophy. 73 00:08:04,270 --> 00:08:08,680 So these are reflexive figuration, the distance, the real thing. 74 00:08:08,680 --> 00:08:13,840 And, of course, imply that to be poor is to have an impoverished inner life. 75 00:08:13,840 --> 00:08:21,820 Kumar, however, does not mention Freud's technique papers where he, especially his father, recommendation on the technique of psychoanalysis, 76 00:08:21,820 --> 00:08:25,780 where he frets on the investment of time and money in therapy, 77 00:08:25,780 --> 00:08:34,760 and the impossibility of delivering what he calls a short, convenient outpatient treatment for obsessional neurosis. 78 00:08:34,760 --> 00:08:38,180 Arguing against gratuitous treatments, you know, a therapy session, 79 00:08:38,180 --> 00:08:46,580 Freud says in an is an investment of time equivalent of a seventh or eighth part of the psychoanalysts monthly stint, 80 00:08:46,580 --> 00:08:53,540 Freud's let slip so he's against free treatment. But he let slip that he had offered free psychoanalysis as an experiment, 81 00:08:53,540 --> 00:09:04,220 only to realise that removing the transactional and regulatory element vastly increased instead of alleviating the neurotic resistances. 82 00:09:04,220 --> 00:09:10,890 Kumar also does not touch on the free clinic phenomenon, which is kind of the starting point of my. 83 00:09:10,890 --> 00:09:17,600 Project. So two months before the armistice at the 5th International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Budapest, 84 00:09:17,600 --> 00:09:22,160 Sigmund Freud famously declared that the poor man should have just as much right to 85 00:09:22,160 --> 00:09:28,890 assistance for his mind as he now has to the life saving help offered by surgery. 86 00:09:28,890 --> 00:09:34,050 There necessary aim to be a de facto science Freud's clinical practise embraced 87 00:09:34,050 --> 00:09:40,110 the social democratic ideology of post-World War One Vienna between 1918 and 1938. 88 00:09:40,110 --> 00:09:48,310 His pronouncements on free clinics helped create a dozen of cooperative mental health clinics from Zagreb to London. 89 00:09:48,310 --> 00:09:53,340 I was very feel very fortunate that I've been able to work at some of these for this book. 90 00:09:53,340 --> 00:09:59,610 There were free clinics, literally and metaphorically a and done two states. 91 00:09:59,610 --> 00:10:07,860 The freed people of their destructive neuroses. And like the municipal schools and universities of Europe, they were free of charge. 92 00:10:07,860 --> 00:10:12,420 I mean, I really have to sort of rush through this bit because I want to show you my casework. 93 00:10:12,420 --> 00:10:17,790 But just like. Sorry, just this bit. 94 00:10:17,790 --> 00:10:24,180 The free clinics and kind of sick Europe, you know, what did the free clinic do to not just free treatment, 95 00:10:24,180 --> 00:10:31,860 but connecting psychoanalysis with public health, clinical research, free outpatient clinics and a voluntary free fee structure? 96 00:10:31,860 --> 00:10:36,300 So not just low fee, but a sliding fee, which is much more sustainable. 97 00:10:36,300 --> 00:10:39,420 A voucher system, you're afraid, very bloody minded thinker. 98 00:10:39,420 --> 00:10:47,040 He's too busy, but he has a voucher system where he can actually say that this person can actually, 99 00:10:47,040 --> 00:10:55,770 you know, sort of see you on my behalf and I'll reimburse a colleague. Question of gender, sex and sexuality So they became very, very interesting. 100 00:10:55,770 --> 00:11:06,930 Research centres for women's health and children's health, social welfare, you know, pioneering work in the field of child and adolescent development. 101 00:11:06,930 --> 00:11:12,630 I am going to kind of like maybe linger there and then come back to come back to it. 102 00:11:12,630 --> 00:11:19,810 So. In the sorry yes, and the frequent phenomenon did not last long. 103 00:11:19,810 --> 00:11:26,260 Very short lived. In 1933, Freud's books were banned in Berlin, and the frequent phenomenon ended when, 104 00:11:26,260 --> 00:11:33,520 on March 12, 1938, thousands of men to German troops marched the Nazi flag into Vienna. 105 00:11:33,520 --> 00:11:35,110 So in the chapter from which it was drawn, 106 00:11:35,110 --> 00:11:42,940 I examined the evolution of psychoanalysis in India as accidentally coinciding with the free clinic movement. 107 00:11:42,940 --> 00:11:51,340 And just want to kind of like you've already mentioned, getting the Chicago Bulls just wanted to kind of mention the founding of Lumbini Park, 108 00:11:51,340 --> 00:11:58,390 the image you first saw of the Bengali bubble receiving therapy. It's actually from the 1940s units in Lumbini Park. 109 00:11:58,390 --> 00:12:03,760 Just dwell on this slide a little bit similarities between Lumbini Park and the free clinic model, 110 00:12:03,760 --> 00:12:10,900 so equal emphasis on scientific and humanitarian work. The founders aspired to build a teaching and research centre. 111 00:12:10,900 --> 00:12:17,050 Plans included the foundation of a child guidance centre, is a non-profit organisation as well, with a voluntary fee. 112 00:12:17,050 --> 00:12:23,890 And this is the extraordinary thing about the Ngobeni Park and the free clinic model that they're non synchronous in some ways, 113 00:12:23,890 --> 00:12:27,010 not adjacent cultures that just the dates overlap. 114 00:12:27,010 --> 00:12:33,340 But there was no correspondence between both who was very, very instrumental in this or kind of, you know, 115 00:12:33,340 --> 00:12:40,870 the the kind of Indian Socratic that the newly minted Indian psychiatric society, the other kind of, you know, 116 00:12:40,870 --> 00:12:46,600 very interesting thing about Liberty Park is that at a time when thousands of psychotics lived behind prison bars, 117 00:12:46,600 --> 00:12:56,380 the stigmatising word lunacy persisted and Liberty Park offered a systematic psychological as well as physical appraisal of each individual case. 118 00:12:56,380 --> 00:13:03,360 In my chapter, I kind of go through these unintentional but rather sort of uncanny similarities. 119 00:13:03,360 --> 00:13:07,030 And I kind of move up to kind of present times. 120 00:13:07,030 --> 00:13:12,220 As you know, several people have mentioned, psychoanalysis is in disrepute in India. 121 00:13:12,220 --> 00:13:16,480 You know, psychiatry, you know, 70 percent of psychiatrists work in the private sector. 122 00:13:16,480 --> 00:13:26,560 The 2010 study of Michelle by Mr. Girish Word states that there are 3500 psychiatrists in the country to its 600 clinical psychologists. 123 00:13:26,560 --> 00:13:30,370 The number of psychoanalysts has dwindled to 31. 124 00:13:30,370 --> 00:13:41,660 And so in the context of this, I examine a free or low fee initiatives which offer psychologically informed psychotherapy to poor populations. 125 00:13:41,660 --> 00:13:45,880 So before I share my case studies, I want to kind of like mention some of the hurdles. 126 00:13:45,880 --> 00:13:51,670 You know, that I have faced some of the sort of not so I'm trying to work through. The first has to do with the cost of psychoanalysis. 127 00:13:51,670 --> 00:13:58,990 As I mentioned before, the payment for treatment is very crucial to the transference, relation and psychoanalysis. 128 00:13:58,990 --> 00:14:01,750 The transparencies, as at once, 129 00:14:01,750 --> 00:14:09,550 both the obstacle to the talking cure and the means of walking through that is a way of cordoning off the tendency to repeat, 130 00:14:09,550 --> 00:14:15,250 to act out and to run it through the transfer circuit. Through the payment of a fee. 131 00:14:15,250 --> 00:14:24,010 The libidinal economy of the psychoanalytic dyad is set in play, the ANALIZZATO becoming bonded to the analyst connected, 132 00:14:24,010 --> 00:14:28,960 but also invested in a kind of imaginative and financial speculation. 133 00:14:28,960 --> 00:14:33,580 The concept of free clinics, therefore, is not free of contradiction. 134 00:14:33,580 --> 00:14:38,620 The transference as Michel Foucault, one of psychoanalysis, is most, you know, a critical reader's has not, 135 00:14:38,620 --> 00:14:43,420 as is precisely what differentiates psychoanalysis from the ethnological science. 136 00:14:43,420 --> 00:14:52,660 It drew from. It's difficult to sort of let go of it with the payment with with the sort of, you know, entry exemption of of payment. 137 00:14:52,660 --> 00:14:58,090 The second thing the second hurdle is this question is there a connexion between poverty and mental illness? 138 00:14:58,090 --> 00:15:05,070 Can a study of mental illness in poor populations contribute to a fuller understanding of urban poverty? 139 00:15:05,070 --> 00:15:12,990 The third very critical one is how cross-culturally applicable is psychoanalysis cannot cope with race and cultural 140 00:15:12,990 --> 00:15:21,240 difference cannot cope with this disparate paradigms of individual and collective trauma and individuation in extremists. 141 00:15:21,240 --> 00:15:28,260 Psychoanalysis is culturally specific, as we know, traceable not to the beginning of time, but to the end of the 19th century. 142 00:15:28,260 --> 00:15:36,600 And and, you know, the wonderful work by Nicholas Rose, who says that interiority that is the sort of stock in trade of psychoanalysis is, 143 00:15:36,600 --> 00:15:41,940 of course, an inside formed by discourses outside the human being. 144 00:15:41,940 --> 00:15:51,600 Rose says is not an immutable entity, but a latitude and longitude at which different vectors of different speeds intersect. 145 00:15:51,600 --> 00:15:57,720 However, Rose says in the same breath that psychoanalysis is very valuable for its refusal to 146 00:15:57,720 --> 00:16:05,850 celebrate the sovereignty of the autonomous and self-identified subject of self-realisation. 147 00:16:05,850 --> 00:16:13,530 So one of the questions I have is that if we can prove that psychoanalysis is a sort of a non-political discourse, 148 00:16:13,530 --> 00:16:21,810 can it be mobilised to articulate what Emily APTA, in a different context, calls a dispossessing of collectivism? 149 00:16:21,810 --> 00:16:32,520 Can it kind of in a form, a kind of psychotherapeutic public defined by non-proprietary models of language and identity? 150 00:16:32,520 --> 00:16:37,230 I'm now going to take you to South Bangalore. Yes. 151 00:16:37,230 --> 00:16:42,900 So these are these are some of my curse words because, you know, this is, as I said, it's kind of like almost a decade long project. 152 00:16:42,900 --> 00:16:50,370 I have too much. A lot of it is still unprocessed. But I thought I would illustrate some of my points through the case studies. 153 00:16:50,370 --> 00:16:53,010 So this is the sum of Hanaa Counselling Centre in the book, 154 00:16:53,010 --> 00:17:01,650 I kind of write also about the trajectories I've had to kind of in a way carry out to reach these centres. 155 00:17:01,650 --> 00:17:05,700 The formidable Chandrashekhar, a.k.a. CRC, 156 00:17:05,700 --> 00:17:14,220 who was described by some Nieman psychiatrist as the rock star of psychiatry and who in his heyday is treated up to 50 patients a day, 157 00:17:14,220 --> 00:17:21,720 is deeply invested in two causes, raising social awareness around mental health and furthering mental health education. 158 00:17:21,720 --> 00:17:29,550 That's the first one, and the second is counteracting the commodification of mental illness in the lucrative pharmacotherapy Chandrashekhar, 159 00:17:29,550 --> 00:17:33,750 who was a psychiatrist at an enhanced for 44 years, retiring in 2013. 160 00:17:33,750 --> 00:17:42,990 As time has tirelessly translated his vast medical experience in one of India's foremost public sector mental hospitals into public lectures, 161 00:17:42,990 --> 00:17:48,510 public education initiatives, ambulatory care and villages, and finally, 162 00:17:48,510 --> 00:17:53,940 the rehabilitation centres and free clinics he has set up with his private funds in the city. 163 00:17:53,940 --> 00:17:59,850 Sorry, this section of the paper is called abbreviation, so he reaches out to 150 villages around Bangalore. 164 00:17:59,850 --> 00:18:05,700 To those people, he says, who doesn't? Who don't have the 50 percent less than you can offer? 165 00:18:05,700 --> 00:18:13,890 One cent 50, I guess, bus fare to the city and has published over 100 popular books on psychiatry, 166 00:18:13,890 --> 00:18:18,570 some of which have been translated from the original camera to Urdu, English and Gujarat. 167 00:18:18,570 --> 00:18:26,010 He receives letters from patients in Karnataka and the adjoining states, describing various mental problems every day. 168 00:18:26,010 --> 00:18:31,650 So far, I have replied to more than 40000 letters, she tells me. 169 00:18:31,650 --> 00:18:39,570 It was an interest in Canada literature that drove CRC to psychiatry, particularly the way in which human behaviour was an atomised, he said. 170 00:18:39,570 --> 00:18:48,900 In the novels of Triveni and the books of our serum, however, mental health care is not just about delving into the unconscious of individual minds. 171 00:18:48,900 --> 00:18:52,770 It is also about addressing the psychiatric health of society. 172 00:18:52,770 --> 00:19:02,760 The 710A Counselling Centre is run by counsellors trained by CRC and a team of psychiatrists and psychologists over 25 to 50 sessions. 173 00:19:02,760 --> 00:19:08,160 We primarily teach counsellors how to be empathetic. He was really like asking me to train as a counsellor, and it was. 174 00:19:08,160 --> 00:19:17,230 I really wish I could. So he shows me a hand-drawn diagram that outlines the basic tenets of counselling and thought bubbles 175 00:19:17,230 --> 00:19:22,440 arranged around the terms of the term as counselling and the and the terms around it are listening, 176 00:19:22,440 --> 00:19:30,870 understanding, being non-judgmental, being responsive, keeping confidences and finally making a change. 177 00:19:30,870 --> 00:19:35,700 The counsellors are volunteers, mostly white collar professionals, with two or three languages. 178 00:19:35,700 --> 00:19:43,170 One of the counsellors I interviewed, Gottfried Prasad, has degrees in clinical psychology and education and volunteers once a week at the centre. 179 00:19:43,170 --> 00:19:50,280 The counsellors and psychotherapists do not follow any school of treatment as such, and methodology tends to be eclectic. 180 00:19:50,280 --> 00:19:55,470 I would describe it as supportive psychotherapy, a combination of psychodynamic cognitive, 181 00:19:55,470 --> 00:20:00,060 behavioural and interpersonal conceptual models and techniques. 182 00:20:00,060 --> 00:20:04,970 So it's rural and poor populations. The task of the counsellor often begins with removing. 183 00:20:04,970 --> 00:20:12,200 Ignorance and addressing misconceptions, superstitions and scientific belief around mental illness are the worst offenders, 184 00:20:12,200 --> 00:20:19,610 and these are all from the sort of, you know, case studies gathered by alignments of planets of the rule, Saturn defects in the horoscope, 185 00:20:19,610 --> 00:20:25,760 the envious attitude of others spirit possession, blackmagic done by enemies. 186 00:20:25,760 --> 00:20:30,530 Fears around masturbation intercourse outside marriage. 187 00:20:30,530 --> 00:20:37,580 Patients at the Santana Counselling Centre start with an initial psychiatric evaluation carried out by CRC, 188 00:20:37,580 --> 00:20:44,180 and the pathological cases are instantly dispatched to demand, so the nearest government hospital with trained psychiatrists, 189 00:20:44,180 --> 00:20:50,180 the counsellors decide over the course of the sessions whether the patient requires medicine, therapy or both. 190 00:20:50,180 --> 00:20:55,820 The device pragmatic, workable and time driven strategies through rapport building, 191 00:20:55,820 --> 00:21:00,890 we allow the patients to find their own resources got through there, he says. 192 00:21:00,890 --> 00:21:08,030 Unlike psychoanalysis, the course of treatment is short, sometimes lasting for just two to three sessions and outcome oriented. 193 00:21:08,030 --> 00:21:12,170 And we can talk about this in Q&A. I obviously don't have time to can go through all of this. 194 00:21:12,170 --> 00:21:18,920 The goal is the alleviation of symptoms not necessarily helping the patients know themselves or their desires. 195 00:21:18,920 --> 00:21:27,440 In fact, the word desire did not come up once the centre is designed to look not so much like an analyst chamber or a set of doctor's chambers, 196 00:21:27,440 --> 00:21:34,430 but a place of active commerce where messages are received, decoded and recorded. 197 00:21:34,430 --> 00:21:39,620 The hallway is divided into makeshift rooms made by temporary partitions. 198 00:21:39,620 --> 00:21:44,960 Patient decks and Cuba cubicles. One can probably hear a patient white and cubicle two. 199 00:21:44,960 --> 00:21:49,640 It is also not uncommon for sessions to be interrupted by CRC or by a member of 200 00:21:49,640 --> 00:21:55,490 the volunteer group wanting to consult the senior therapists on a matter arising. 201 00:21:55,490 --> 00:22:01,280 Some of the bonus programme to receive people who are not likely to do one to one therapy. 202 00:22:01,280 --> 00:22:06,260 The questionnaire you are handed when you step into the portals of the counselling centre is almost 203 00:22:06,260 --> 00:22:12,650 always filled by family and friends and counsellors said they drew heavily on family background, 204 00:22:12,650 --> 00:22:17,960 as well as relying on leads and feedback from the family members. 205 00:22:17,960 --> 00:22:28,220 The most common forms of mental illness they face are depression, anxiety, learning difficulties, neuroses related to family issues, 206 00:22:28,220 --> 00:22:34,670 pride of place taken by mother and mother in law, daughter in law problems and alcohol addiction. 207 00:22:34,670 --> 00:22:39,950 The duration of each session is 30 minutes. Counsellors try to understand the nature of the problem. 208 00:22:39,950 --> 00:22:49,130 Is it guilt? Does it loss? Is it anxiety? While also addressing immediate physical manifestations such as sleep deprivation, loss of appetite. 209 00:22:49,130 --> 00:22:58,140 Low self-esteem? We don't go to childhood experiences because there is no time that you devises. 210 00:22:58,140 --> 00:23:03,870 The case records of some of the counselling centre as reproduced in kiosks, many do it yourself. 211 00:23:03,870 --> 00:23:10,000 Counselling books seem too good to be true, and I'm talking about hundreds of these in my book. 212 00:23:10,000 --> 00:23:16,810 There is 40 something Mrs. Pratibha who has for 18 long years suffered from incontinence when under stress, 213 00:23:16,810 --> 00:23:23,530 the stresses stresses seem at first to be money related. So job loss, debt, the fear of financial ignominy. 214 00:23:23,530 --> 00:23:33,040 The the problem first started at age at age 14, when she both enjoyed and feared a physical relationship with a male classmate. 215 00:23:33,040 --> 00:23:41,080 The counsellor in charge of this case adopts three key strategies enjoins the patient to treat the urinary problem as psychosomatic. 216 00:23:41,080 --> 00:23:49,220 In this case, it means it's treatable through therapy, working at removing guilt around adolescent sexuality. 217 00:23:49,220 --> 00:23:56,210 And recommending practical, commonsense measures, and this is something I've seen across the board in Indian free clinics, 218 00:23:56,210 --> 00:24:04,880 common sense measures such as consuming less fluids before adjourning or informing colleagues and her boss about her medical condition. 219 00:24:04,880 --> 00:24:09,500 The five counselling sessions are supplemented with a consultation with ICRC. 220 00:24:09,500 --> 00:24:15,770 We are told that he prescribe medications to take for some time and instructed them Pratibha and her husband, 221 00:24:15,770 --> 00:24:22,110 who has attended all the sessions to come for weekly follow up sessions to report on progress. 222 00:24:22,110 --> 00:24:27,270 Three months after the sixth session, Pratibha is rid of the problem altogether, 223 00:24:27,270 --> 00:24:32,700 now she now she comes to now once in two months just to recharge herself. 224 00:24:32,700 --> 00:24:38,850 She stopped taking medicines and the problem has not recurred. The case record states have one more case study. 225 00:24:38,850 --> 00:24:46,140 I won't read it now. If you want, I can discuss it during the Q&A. 226 00:24:46,140 --> 00:24:55,470 I mean, I was sort of sceptical when you know, every case study sort of ended very brightly, and I kind of concluded that they lacked transparency, 227 00:24:55,470 --> 00:25:01,560 especially in delineating the role played by pharmacotherapy or psychotherapy or both, 228 00:25:01,560 --> 00:25:07,080 especially when, you know the delivery of these was integrated in the course of a given treatment. 229 00:25:07,080 --> 00:25:13,770 So while CAC had oversight when it came to counsellors, his own medical practise was not monitored, 230 00:25:13,770 --> 00:25:18,660 and the counsellors say rightly that the centre has 100 percent success rate. 231 00:25:18,660 --> 00:25:25,440 Their urge to reintegrate people with psychosocial disabilities back to the society is admirable. 232 00:25:25,440 --> 00:25:30,960 But in the absence of follow up exercises, the claim seems dubious. 233 00:25:30,960 --> 00:25:39,180 So finally, you know, the sort of, you know, the methodology of counsellors is too eclectic and too ad hoc to set solid precedents. 234 00:25:39,180 --> 00:25:45,630 So, you know, Seattle and difficult is the sort of engine room of some and his other sort of, you know, free clinics such as Prasanna. 235 00:25:45,630 --> 00:25:51,510 But it's very difficult to imagine the centres running at all without or after him. 236 00:25:51,510 --> 00:25:55,680 I remembered after, I'd say, talk about two sort of unique case studies in detail in this chapter. 237 00:25:55,680 --> 00:26:03,900 I remembered afterwards that the two female patients I dwell on in this chapter had both insisted on absolute confidentiality. 238 00:26:03,900 --> 00:26:10,500 There were middle class women struggling to make ends meet, and while none of them were sort of, you know, troubled by hunger, 239 00:26:10,500 --> 00:26:19,740 inequality or the wide gap between financial predicament and the prevailing standards of necessities that we associate with acute poverty, 240 00:26:19,740 --> 00:26:23,610 this too, you know, would be a definition of a free clinic. 241 00:26:23,610 --> 00:26:28,050 I'd have to acknowledge that a free clinic is a safe haven where women could, 242 00:26:28,050 --> 00:26:32,340 under the cover of anonymity and immune from social discrimination or moral sense, 243 00:26:32,340 --> 00:26:42,050 should be allowed to be allowed to talk freely and be hard and liberate themselves from obsessional neuroses. 244 00:26:42,050 --> 00:26:49,640 I will move on to Kolkata to kind of a case study from Calcutta in Kolkata for years, I've worked with Anjali, 245 00:26:49,640 --> 00:26:58,940 which is a mental health rights NGO whose aim is to establish a mental health and mental illness within the mainstream health paradigm in India. 246 00:26:58,940 --> 00:27:02,930 So Anjali works with three public sector mental hospitals in West Bengal. 247 00:27:02,930 --> 00:27:10,100 Pavlov's Lumbini Lumbini comes back again and Balrampur and the aims of the Anjali intervention are as 248 00:27:10,100 --> 00:27:17,300 follows full rehabilitation of psychiatric patients to family and society after the course of treatment. 249 00:27:17,300 --> 00:27:26,240 Removing stigma around psychosocial disability by encouraging encouraging civic participation in this rehabilitation. 250 00:27:26,240 --> 00:27:35,090 Upholding the human rights of each patient by enlisting their participation and consent and decisions impacting their lives. 251 00:27:35,090 --> 00:27:41,900 So I want to kind of talk a little bit about my collaboration with John Romano. It's an Angeles community mental health initiative. 252 00:27:41,900 --> 00:27:51,020 Gentlemen, these are John Manoush, which concerns the training of Lay Counsellors, the very foundation foundation of the free clinic edifice. 253 00:27:51,020 --> 00:27:56,180 So in 2016, I attended a skills training sessions and such as like something like the team building workshop. 254 00:27:56,180 --> 00:28:01,430 They also have that focussed on personal growth and domestic violence. 255 00:28:01,430 --> 00:28:12,260 All six women drawn from poor households had experienced brutalising experiences of physical or psychological torture within the nuclear family. 256 00:28:12,260 --> 00:28:18,020 In half of the cases, the violence was endemic, the perpetrator still in an intimate relationship with the victim. 257 00:28:18,020 --> 00:28:26,360 And while the latter had coping mechanisms in place, there was clear evidence of residual rage and guilt and unresolved trauma. 258 00:28:26,360 --> 00:28:30,860 So the participants were eloquent and presented and consolidated insights. 259 00:28:30,860 --> 00:28:39,800 Common features and causes of domestic violence were recognised, and its debilitating physical and psychological impact dwelt on. 260 00:28:39,800 --> 00:28:44,300 The facilitator then offered ways in which, through introspection and esteem, 261 00:28:44,300 --> 00:28:50,090 building the difficult task of regeneration and self-empowerment could begin. 262 00:28:50,090 --> 00:28:54,920 So the participants of this workshop, all seven of them run the general manager programme. 263 00:28:54,920 --> 00:29:03,250 The five of them here. John Romano, roughly translated as the psyche of the people, 264 00:29:03,250 --> 00:29:12,080 strategically uses the city's extend municipal corporation system to train volunteers and barefoot researchers in therapeutic techniques. 265 00:29:12,080 --> 00:29:18,190 So this is, you know what Sudhir Kakar called the analyst does the vulnerable expert. 266 00:29:18,190 --> 00:29:25,870 The aim is to again disregard the stigmatised, institutionalised mental health and make it accessible to last mile communities. 267 00:29:25,870 --> 00:29:31,240 At the Roger, Larger had global poor kiosks, so this is the kiosk that I shadowed. 268 00:29:31,240 --> 00:29:40,000 Initiated by Anjali in 2007, the all woman team of counsellors engage with the local population in the form of dialogue and counselling, 269 00:29:40,000 --> 00:29:47,380 door-to-door leafleting, home visits, etc. The General Manager Programme believes that for a psychic capability to be secured, 270 00:29:47,380 --> 00:29:55,840 this kind of talk therapy has to play a role alongside sort of general policies in the area of social and economic entitlements. 271 00:29:55,840 --> 00:30:01,990 The seven lay counsellors all related their commitment to mental health as a striving for social equality, 272 00:30:01,990 --> 00:30:09,190 both for their adolescence and for themselves. One of them reminded me that this social work was not a hobby, 273 00:30:09,190 --> 00:30:16,360 but a livelihood and mobility story that lifted them from violent, deprived, precarious living conditions. 274 00:30:16,360 --> 00:30:23,080 It made them feel valued where they had felt valueless before Mulherin came Moldovan for India. 275 00:30:23,080 --> 00:30:26,250 That's the sort of Bengali phrase they used. 276 00:30:26,250 --> 00:30:33,480 And detailed sort of interviews I conducted with them all, the counsellors recounted painful, poverty stricken childhoods. 277 00:30:33,480 --> 00:30:40,680 So Monica and this is Monica, she won a sort of Presidents Award Woman Exemplar programme when it comes to gender. 278 00:30:40,680 --> 00:30:44,670 Monica mentioned 17 years of trauma in her sort of early life. 279 00:30:44,670 --> 00:30:50,640 So domestic violence, a lack of educational opportunities, dead-end, low paying jobs. 280 00:30:50,640 --> 00:30:56,580 They said that this dominant in culture, this quotidian struggle made them the caregivers they were. 281 00:30:56,580 --> 00:31:01,830 They call themselves 40 Cherbourg, which just kind of I guess the closest translation is caregivers. 282 00:31:01,830 --> 00:31:05,850 Rajan Heart, where they work, is a struggling suburb of Calcutta. 283 00:31:05,850 --> 00:31:11,280 The political turmoil in Bengal has meant that when the region had global poor municipality was dissolved. 284 00:31:11,280 --> 00:31:18,780 The threadbare resources of this, you know, seven percent kiosk solved all the mental health support in the neighbourhood. 285 00:31:18,780 --> 00:31:22,710 With the dissolving of the municipality and escalating a political conflict, 286 00:31:22,710 --> 00:31:27,870 the kiosk had to eventually shut down for a brief period when there was a murder at the doorstep. 287 00:31:27,870 --> 00:31:36,450 The clientele is 60 percent Hindu, 40 percent Muslim, occasional Christian and Adivasi or grandparent patients. 288 00:31:36,450 --> 00:31:45,510 Patients come from households, so households of five or six, which earn less than 5000 Indian rupees per year. 289 00:31:45,510 --> 00:31:50,280 Sorry, but a month or so, 20 percent of the population in this enlarged heart. 290 00:31:50,280 --> 00:31:56,040 They live in slums, and 16 percent of this slum population is below the poverty line. 291 00:31:56,040 --> 00:32:00,480 The clients come by themselves, are brought to the kiosk by concerned family. 292 00:32:00,480 --> 00:32:06,900 Roughly half of the clients have a psychiatric history and are already receiving some form of psychiatric treatment. 293 00:32:06,900 --> 00:32:12,150 In many cases, this treatment is facilitated and continued by Anjali workers. 294 00:32:12,150 --> 00:32:19,290 The roster of illnesses includes paranoid schizophrenia, depression, OCD, bipolar disorder dementia. 295 00:32:19,290 --> 00:32:23,820 Talk therapy at the kiosk addresses symptoms in a compassionate way pills can't. 296 00:32:23,820 --> 00:32:27,570 This is language used by the counsellors fanatic cleanliness. 297 00:32:27,570 --> 00:32:36,390 The symptoms should be recorded in Bengali insomnia, domestic violence, lack of personal hygiene, pyromania and, of course, suicidal thoughts. 298 00:32:36,390 --> 00:32:44,220 There is also counselling for non psychiatrist symptoms, so I want to talk and briefly like you to talk about a very elaborate case study. 299 00:32:44,220 --> 00:32:48,390 A young man comes to the kiosk saying he suffers from crippling, low self-esteem. 300 00:32:48,390 --> 00:32:53,940 He's disoriented, can't take decisions, can't even make eye contact with his interlocutors. 301 00:32:53,940 --> 00:33:01,530 And the reason why this is a deadly problem is he's a traffic policeman, so it's never really an accident waiting to happen that, you know, 302 00:33:01,530 --> 00:33:09,360 his sleeplessness has periodic amnesia and a developing alcohol addiction alongside his inability to make eye contact with people. 303 00:33:09,360 --> 00:33:15,990 He's sort of obviously signalling. He has married a village girl and seems to be fixating on her lack of educational qualifications, 304 00:33:15,990 --> 00:33:20,370 so she actually has secondary education 10 standard exams to her name. 305 00:33:20,370 --> 00:33:25,140 The counsellors suspect he's seeking their approval to carry out an extramarital affair, 306 00:33:25,140 --> 00:33:30,720 so the respond frankly help your wife to come up in life instead of opting for a new woman. 307 00:33:30,720 --> 00:33:39,600 One of them advises the women. Women are not smart phones is an analogy used by one of the women on smartphones, Nokia or Reliance. 308 00:33:39,600 --> 00:33:48,240 So the counsellor says with barely concealed pride and the cunning metaphor which can be swapped or upgraded, the man continues to come to the kiosk. 309 00:33:48,240 --> 00:33:55,710 Despite this reprimand and says in one of his monthly follow ups that he could not have talked to relatives about any of this. 310 00:33:55,710 --> 00:33:59,760 This is ongoing. The treatment sessions are like islands people follow. 311 00:33:59,760 --> 00:34:05,710 They come back again. They often have to be referred to public hospitals, etc. 312 00:34:05,710 --> 00:34:10,810 The John Managed kiosk is also an ambulatory in the sense of the free clinic, but the Freudian free clinic, 313 00:34:10,810 --> 00:34:18,110 in the sense of the counsellors go knocking on doors and armed with introductions and hand builds an offer to discuss mental health problems. 314 00:34:18,110 --> 00:34:23,830 Monnett Gotha is the term they use. Not not to be confused with Modi's Mann Ki Baat. 315 00:34:23,830 --> 00:34:31,750 This is sort of heart to heart would be the most accurate, if not literal translation in the process at the doorsteps, then counter paedophilia. 316 00:34:31,750 --> 00:34:35,950 Marital rape addiction depression isn't leading to loss of function, 317 00:34:35,950 --> 00:34:41,590 and they make notes on the families that are particularly afflicted and follow up. 318 00:34:41,590 --> 00:34:49,000 Why should I talk to you? Someone asked Monica. Because I will listen with full attention, she replied readily. 319 00:34:49,000 --> 00:34:55,840 The wives are more responsive to these home visits. They observe the home visits and word of mouth work. 320 00:34:55,840 --> 00:34:58,120 They walk as excellent publicity for the kiosk, 321 00:34:58,120 --> 00:35:07,350 where there are two counsellors for each patient 30 to 40 minute sessions and four to five sittings a month for six to eight months. 322 00:35:07,350 --> 00:35:16,140 Counselling helps our patients express pain, resolve dilemmas, diffuse family and mental pressures, and get clarity. 323 00:35:16,140 --> 00:35:20,820 We work hard to make sure it is not branded as Pagal ID cards. 324 00:35:20,820 --> 00:35:30,210 The treatment of madness, but is instead an opportunity for those oppressed by silence to talk, says one of the counsellors. 325 00:35:30,210 --> 00:35:33,360 I'm going to conclude, I mean, I'm not trying to. 326 00:35:33,360 --> 00:35:36,570 This book is not about psychoanalysis in an international frame. 327 00:35:36,570 --> 00:35:42,180 I think it's naive and futile to agitate for a more equitable distribution of Freudian 328 00:35:42,180 --> 00:35:46,980 psychoanalysis when the discipline itself is has fallen into disuse in India. 329 00:35:46,980 --> 00:35:53,010 It is, however, not naive and futile to urgently question the prejudice that the poor may not have emotional 330 00:35:53,010 --> 00:35:58,320 resources to sustain deep analytic work or the prejudice which I see in a lot of these, 331 00:35:58,320 --> 00:36:01,560 you know, sort of like GPL guys, you know, poverty action lab guys, 332 00:36:01,560 --> 00:36:07,110 the chronic poor need immediate relief and contributions, not psychotherapeutic assistance. 333 00:36:07,110 --> 00:36:12,360 As Professor Honey Oberoi Vallely, a psychoanalyst who runs a free clinic at Ambedkar University, 334 00:36:12,360 --> 00:36:16,350 says and she's echoing from Friday here without knowing it. 335 00:36:16,350 --> 00:36:27,110 Rather, unlike psychiatry, where the illness metaphor can ruin psychoanalysis can enable us to work with the patients, not just on them. 336 00:36:27,110 --> 00:36:33,020 So my scholarship urges that we democratise not just the curative function of psychoanalysis, 337 00:36:33,020 --> 00:36:40,880 but its epistemological one, which involves the cultivation of complex temporality and psychic depths. 338 00:36:40,880 --> 00:36:46,130 It also cautions that our inability or unwillingness to recognise the psychic life of 339 00:36:46,130 --> 00:36:52,730 poverty would be responsible for the denial of legitimate community to poor populations. 340 00:36:52,730 --> 00:37:00,565 Thank you.