Does Dignity Step Back For Stigma In India…?

By: Jose Thomas

We are living in a world where people find reasons to criticize and spread rumors around for no reasons, let it can be called as a part of stigma, jealousy or attitude, but life has to move on. In this small note I would like to connect these two factors they are stigma and dignity in mental health.

In older days and even in the current scenario in certain remote areas people find the psychiatric problems as some sort of punishments for the family from God, or some sort of play by an evil spirit or disorder itself for which people generally use the term ‘Mental’.

I have been observing this even before I thought of coming to this profession that anyone who approaches a psychiatrist or a psychologist or get in to any sort of psychiatric treatment gets labeled as mental or pagal. This is completely out of stigma where people have failed to have the correct information or we can say lack of civilization like some of the western countries. In countries like United States and Australia the people taking treatment while applying for the job never hesitate to write even the kind of psychiatric medications that they takes in their resume. It is not because of they are American or Australian, its because mental illness is not stigmatized to such high levels and people consider mental illness as any other illnesses which can be treatable and manageable. Where as in our country it all lays in the paper but the society don’t change their attitude towards people diagnosed with mental illness. Here we can link the stigma and dignity. People hide their problems and hesitate to come out for treatment or rehabilitation because of the fear that they may loose their dignity.

Our country is also not that backward in education and its getting civilized day by day, but our people doesn’t want to change their attitude. This change of attitude should start from you, if the person who reads this article do think the same, time is already over to change your attitude towards people with mental illness and make sure if you can help a person to get rehabilitated out any psychiatric problem or when you start respecting them for the efforts they have had to come out the problem, you are the person who really means the word dignity for a human being irrespective of what he is whom you can be at any point of your life…Dignity matters a lot for an individual to get treated and rehabilitated…Let this World Mental Health Day make a change all over.