Mental healthcare spaces, ambivalence of caregiving, and Indian memoirs of psychiatric patients

Abstract

Mental healthcare facilities in hospitals and rehabilitation centres are crucial for providing medical treatment and care. These therapeutic environments manifest as both fulfilled, empathetic spaces of care and as sites tainted by denial of care and exploitation. This article utilises illness memoirs or ‘pathographies’ as an entry point to understand the intricacies of experiential facets of caregiving within mental healthcare spaces. Set against the backdrop of the evolving landscape of psychiatric facilities in India, transitioning from asylums in the pre-independent era to mental hospitals in the post-independent era and rehabilitation centres in the 1990s, this article analyses two important postcolonial Indian pathographies: Swadesh Deepak's Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha: Khandit Jeevan ka Collage, 2003 (I Have Not Seen Mandu: A Fractured Soul-Memoir, 2021), translated by Jerry Pinto and Shreevatsa Nevatia's How to Travel Light: My Memories of Madness and Melancholia (2017). These memoirs allow us to explore the dynamics of caregiving practices within the evolving spatial modalities of mental healthcare spaces in India. Drawing on insights from theorists such as Anne H Hawkins, Sarah Ann Pinto, Arthur Kleinman, Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman and others, the article examines the complex dynamics and ambivalence inherent in the practices of care and denial within mental healthcare spaces. This nuanced analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the experiential reality of care within distinct mental healthcare spaces of hospitals and rehabilitation centres in India, shedding light on the intricate interplay between individual narratives and broader sociocultural contexts.