India-Shadow People: Delhi's mental health crisis (24 images)

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The poor have been airbrushed from the narrative of modern India. Delhi, a metaphor for 'India Shining', is in the grip of a quiet mental health crisis.

Experts estimate around 20 million Indians suffer serious mental disorders, most hidden from public view by their families. Delhi is a city of migrants and everyday thousands come here to try and escape the poverty of the village. Many will remain homeless, divorced from the traditional family structure and culture. An increasing...
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The poor have been airbrushed from the narrative of modern India. Delhi, a metaphor for 'India Shining', is in the grip of a quiet mental health crisis.

Experts estimate around 20 million Indians suffer serious mental disorders, most hidden from public view by their families. Delhi is a city of migrants and everyday thousands come here to try and escape the poverty of the village. Many will remain homeless, divorced from the traditional family structure and culture. An increasing number fall into mental illness. There is an army of homeless in Delhi conservatively estimated to number around 100,000 people. Mental illness in this group is treated either by violence from the rest of the community or traditional 'quack' or faith healers.

Delhi itself is a city full of trauma. The city was destroyed by the British in 1857, by Partition nearly a century later and riven by anti-Sikh violence in 1984 after Indira Gandhi's murder. Delhi has lost a great deal of its culture and the sense of itself. A psychiatrist might contend that through its rampant consumerism it is trying to 'feed itself' an identity.

Nimesh Desai, head of psychiatry at the New Delhi-based Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences, estimates India has fewer than 4,000 psychiatrists, and even fewer general mental health professionals.

Desai has however attempted a solution. After eight years of intense lobbying, his team conduct weekly open-air surgeries for the mentally ill homeless in Old Delhi near the Jama Masjid. He is accompanied by a High Court judge who, in a very Indian way, passes judgement on each patient assessing whether Desai can inject them with anti-psychotic drugs. On rare occasions he Sections them to his mental hospital in the east of the city.
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