Conversations on Mental Health and therapy often get restricted to individual well being, neglecting the role of the social and embodied context in which we experience healthy living or the lack of it. This problem got highlighted with Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi’s suicide where there was an attempt to isolate their mental health from the discriminatory and exclusionary behaviour by the institution, which was the primary cause of it. Time and again, we witness the deterioration of mental health of people caused by exclusionary structures of caste, patriarchy, heteronormativism, communalism and such. Amongst all of this, caste and its intersection with other identities hardly get discussed as it is portrayed as a thing of the past. This invisibilization causes a lot of stress among the historically oppressed Bahujan communities (Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes). Most of the mental health professionals in India also come from dominant caste backgrounds and their blindness to caste realities have a serious impact on their colleagues and clients from Bahujan communities. This huge gap needs to be bridged and the only way to do it would be to speak about mental health in relation to caste.

In our series of Expressive Conversations, we feature Divya Kandukuri, a mental health professional working on the intersection of caste and mental health and the founder of the organisation Blue Dawn, will be in conversation with Vijayashanthi Murthy, Assistant Professor at St. Joseph’s College, Bengaluru.