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Sudarshan R Kottai

Indian institute of technology, Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty Member

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I am an Assistant Professor in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad, India. I am a licensed (RCI) clinical psychologist whose doctoral work investigated the everyday narratives and practices of mental health care and chronicity which are constructed by official discourses of state and bio-medicine. A recipient of research appreciation award for my PhD work, my writings have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies on Health and Illness, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry and Economic and Political Weekly.

Informed by the politics, history and philosophy of psy disciplines, I examine the complexities and ambiguities in the context of increasing metricalisation, technocratisation, globalization and scientifisation of mental health care. I grapple with questions of philosophical interest in mental health care like why mainstream mental health academia/research/ practice primarily engage in ‘mirroring’ the world rather than in ‘world-making. I encourage research committed to thinking the previously unthinkable broadly in the following areas: qualitative methodology, mental health interventions with minority/marginalized populations, mental health in the context of gender, disabilities and sexualities, social disadvantage, and intersections in mental health all taking inter and multidisciplinary perspectives.
Supervisors: Dr Shubha Ranganathan, Associate Professor, IIT Hyderabad.
Address: Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad
Kanjikkode | Palakkad
Kerala | Pin: 678623

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Papers by Sudarshan R Kottai

Mental health is a moral and ethical issue

The Hindu, 2024

Karthik, a driver at a university, was happy when I asked him how he feels on campus. “We are dri... more Karthik, a driver at a university, was happy when I asked him how he feels on campus. “We are drivers. So, nobody values us, Sir,” he replied. “The professors are elitist. They don’t even bother to greet us. They only mingle with people at their ‘level’”. Similarly, while I was alighting from an autorickshaw, the driver, Ajay, told me, “No other customer has talked to me like you did, Sir.” I asked him what the reason could be. “Who bothers to talk to a driver, Sir,” he replied. It is common to see people at the higher echelons of society cross paths with drivers and security guards and disregard them. To willfully not recognise someone is moral violence.

Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in IndiaEcksStefan

Sage eBooks, Sep 1, 2017

<i>‘Doctors advised to take medicines to remove these thoughts’:</i> the violence and violations in sexual mental health care in community mental health programmes in Kerala

Community development journal, Apr 3, 2024

https://connect.springerpub.com/content/sgrehpp/early/2024/08/28/ehpp-2023-0022

Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 2024

In the context of neoliberalism and increasing globalization, technocratization, and scientificat... more In the context of neoliberalism and increasing globalization, technocratization, and scientification of mental health care, people suffering from socio-politico-economic problems ranging from poverty to structural violence are often transmogrified into “patients” with mental health problems to be “treated” with psychopharmaceuticals and individualized psychological therapies. Drawing from three socio-political issues India witnessed in the past 3 years, concerning three marginalized sections, namely, farmers, LGBTQIA+ people, and migrant workers, I illustrate the silence of mainstream mental health disciplines in India on sheer instances of structural violence and social suffering. Deflection of attention from human rights violations by mainstream mental health systems raises critical questions about the ethics and politics of mental health disciplines. The social, political, and material contexts that are central to lived experiences are almost always unaccounted in mental health academia, research, and practice. Engaging people with lived experiences advances equity by breaking down power dynamics, establishing collaborative decision-making, and improving equitable outcomes. Thus, knowledge production in mental health becomes irrelevant to political action and transformative policies that are crucial for positive mental health outcomes. By ignoring and thus implicitly sanctioning discriminatory, exploitive neoliberal architecture, mental health systems maintain the very upstream factors that cultivate and sustain mental distress. In this way, mainstream mental health practice in India fails to undertake world-making, raising deeper questions in public mental health ethics.

Suicide Deaths in India Rethinking Mainstream Mental Health Narratives

Economic and Political Weekly, 2023

The narratives on suicide deaths by mainstream mental health systems frame it as an individual pr... more The narratives on suicide deaths by mainstream mental health systems frame it as an individual problem located within troubled brains and minds without opening up the dynamic between structural violence and lived experiences. The result is the continuous call to upscale access to mental health services to cure sick minds without attending to the sick social structures and systems that create fatal vulnerabilities. A decolonial suicidology is imperative to foreground the lifeworlds of marginalised people like migrant workers who are often targets of the burgeoning mental health industry in the current neo-liberal order.

Why IIT engineering students need social science training The Indian Express

The Indian Express, 2023

#1 Private Un 40% Tuition Fee Waiv for Top 20% Student pes.edu Why IIT engineering students need ... more #1 Private Un 40% Tuition Fee Waiv for Top 20% Student pes.edu Why IIT engineering students need social science training Technology, when applied inappropriately, indiscriminately, and without context could do more harm. Technologies that are value-based, locally relevant, ethical, and sensitive to contexts are assets to society News / Opinion / Columns / Why IIT engineering students need social science training Written by Sudarshan R Kottai

“Initially, medicines will be given, and then we need to study the case”: Medicalized perspectives about chronicity and mental health care in Kerala

Anthropology & Medicine

In response to the global call to upscale mental health services in low-income countries, mental... more In response to the global call to upscale mental health services in low-income countries, mental health non-governmental organisations (MHNGOs) have sprung up in Kerala to address mental health needs by partnering with pre-existing locally grown, bottom-up, community-led pain and palliative clinics (PPCs) to increase access to mental health care through task-shifting. The MHNGOs mandate filtering only patients with ‘severe mental disorders’ from low socioeconomic backgrounds for their free services. This eligibility criterion mandated by the MHNGO is ruffling feathers within the palliative clinics that oppose such classifications. They believe that suffering cuts across all divisions and should not be discriminated against based on economic background and severity of illnesses. When chronicity and suffering are held universal by the MHNGO and palliative care, respectively, it brings to the fore the enactment of two perspectives of care. Drawing on observations of clinical interactions between patients, MHNGO staff and mental health professionals and interviews with community volunteers of palliative care clinics in Kerala, this paper demonstrates how chronicity narrative promoted by MHNGOs based on biopsychiatric model gains hegemony, whereas the community care model loses traction progressively. The state, caught between these two narratives, frontstages development by submitting its health machinery to the MHNGOs flouting basic medical safety laws in its services to marginalised people like the tribal population. This paper argues that the rising dominance of chronicity narrative in community mental health clinics as well as in popular media discourses evolves out of power relations between the MHNGOs and the palliative clinics.

Evolving jurisprudence on conversion therapy: Reconsidering ethics in mental health systems

by Rajalakshmi RamPrakash and Sudarshan R Kottai

Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, 2023

Since the Delhi High Court judgement (2009), reading down IPC 377 that criminalised homosexuality... more Since the Delhi High Court judgement (2009), reading down IPC 377 that criminalised homosexuality, the Indian judiciary has been at the forefront of invoking constitutional morality to uphold LGBTQIA+ rights. In contrast, the mainstream mental health systems have failed to uphold human rights and protect LGBTQIA+ people ethically, except for a few position statements. Though the Supreme Court directed the mental health fraternity to exercise utmost sensitivity to LGBTQIA+ issues, they have not risen to the occasion. The absence of gender affirmative guidelines and failure to put in place punitive action against those practising conversion therapies set apart Indian mental health systems, in stark contrast to international mental health associations. Here, we review landmark judgments and the actions of professional mental health bodies regarding LGBTQIA+ rights in India, from 2009 to 2022 — especially those regarding conversion therapies and the discriminatory medical curriculum — to examine the deepening crisis of public health ethics.

On the cusp of ‘modernity’: Ayurveda’s tryst with ‘development’ in Nepal

Anthropology Book Forum, Oct 26, 2020

Book Review: Bisexual and pansexual identities: Exploring and challenging invisibility and invalidation by Nikki Hayfield

Feminism & Psychology

The private troubles that are told and retold in the clinic are cut off from the larger milieu of... more The private troubles that are told and retold in the clinic are cut off from the larger milieu of the person, a milieu consisting of communities, economy, politics, personal identities and state policies. Creating a human, humane, and more meaningful psychology means drawing from and understanding the historical, political, economic and local contexts that shape diverse ways of being in the world. Bisexual and Pansexual Identities does fulfil this goal evocatively in taking up psychology’s humongous, and delayed, ethical responsibility to throw light on the most marginalised within marginalised sexual subjects – asexual, bisexual, and plurisexual people.

Social Sensitivity of Mental Health Systems

Economic and Political Weekly, 2022

The NCRB data on suicides by daily wage earners underscore the social structural determinants of ... more The NCRB data on suicides by daily wage earners underscore the social structural determinants of mental well-being. Mental health systems ought to shed their apolitical and value-neutral stance in their quest to stay in the camp of medical science to develop what critical scholars call “outsight”—the humility to travel outside the four walls of the clinic centred around individual brains and minds to appreciate the complexities in the shared social world that incessantly shape the way we think, feel and act. It is high time we demanded a decolonial, social materialist, justice-informed knowledge of the mind that foregrounds affective experiences, for people are essentially feeling bodies enmeshed in the social and our distress, an acquired, embodied way of being in the world.

Unruly figures: Queerness, sex work, and the politics of sexuality in Kerala

Contemporary South Asia, 2021

This book stands out in the current environment because it tackles sexuality, a pressing issue of... more This book stands out in the current environment because it tackles sexuality, a pressing issue of contemporary India which most local scholarship steers clear of. It covers with equal emphasis the topic of sex work and lesbian love in ‘the fraught terrains of sexuality politics’ (187). Based on the highly mediated landscape of the south Indian state of Kerala, Mokkil foregrounds vernacular politics of sexuality by focusing on how marginalized sexual figures are produced in the public imagination through local cultural practices. Challenging the widely held belief that the visibility of sexuality is a function of globalization, Mokkil ‘firmly pushes against this linear history’ (6) by arguing that formations of sexuality have been continuously destabilized in Kerala’s postcolonial visual and literary practices. As it untangles the multiple threads of movement of sexual figures across time and space, this book is an invitation to explore internalized local flows and situated knowledge...

Farmers' Protests, Death by Suicides, and Mental Health Systems in India: Critical Questions

Ongoing farmers&#39; protests have once again brought back the spotlight on the agrarian cris... more Ongoing farmers&#39; protests have once again brought back the spotlight on the agrarian crisis in India. Even though upstream factors that perpetuate farmers&#39; suffering, including the role of the state in promoting agrocapitalism, have been discussed extensively by scholars and activists across the spectrum, mental health discourses almost always frame it as a mental health problem to be addressed by increasing access to psychopharmaceuticals. Drawing on developments around farmers&#39; protests and analysis of articles published in flagship journals of largest professional bodies of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists in India, I highlight the intimate relationship between neoliberal state and farmers&#39; distress to which the mental health system shuts its ears and eyes obscuring and downplaying socio-structural determinants of farmers&#39; mental health.

Fractured narratives of psy disciplines and the LGBTQIA+ rights movement in India: A critical examination

Indian journal of medical ethics, 2019

In 2018, a day before the Supreme Court of India commenced hearing the curative petition on Secti... more In 2018, a day before the Supreme Court of India commenced hearing the curative petition on Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (which criminalised �carnal intercourse against the order of nature�), the Indian Psychiatric Society (IPS) issued an official statement that homosexuality is not a mental pathology. In 2014, a year after the top court recriminalised homosexuality, the then IPS president had termed it as a pathology requiring treatment. By examining articles on LGBTQIA+ rights published in two flagship Indian journals in psychiatry and clinical psychology, position statements by professional bodies, and international and national developments in human rights mechanisms, we argue that psychiatry�s voice for human rights protection of the marginalised has been akin to whispering sweet nothings in tune with the juridico-penal system. In turn, clinical psychology appears to huddle with biomedical psychiatry without raising its voice against coercive and traumatising practices ...

How Kerala's poor tribals are being branded as 'mentally ill

Paternalistic governance of mental health practices and advocacy fail to locate mental health pro... more

Practice of family therapy in a heteronormative society of India from queer theory perspective

Open Journal of Psychiatry & Allied Sciences, 2017

In the present paper, we offer to introduce the concept of heteronormativity and its influence on... more In the present paper, we offer to introduce the concept of heteronormativity and its influence on family therapy interventions. We emphasis the dominant role heteronormativity has created over Indian families, that existence or emergence of queer concepts creates innumerable issues. Queer theory's perspective has been used to expand our knowledge and practice beyond the demarcation of heteronormativity. Finally, we emphasis the need of a shift in our therapeutic approaches too. Yet the question persists that are we ready to learn and adapt?

On the cusp of ‘modernity’: Ayurveda’s tryst with ‘development’ in Nepal

MARY CAMERON, 2019, Three Fruits: Nepali Ayurvedic Doctors on Health, Nature, and Social Change. ... more

Task-Shifting in Community Mental Health in Kerala: Tensions and Ruptures

Medical Anthropology, 2020

A mental health epidemic? Critical questions on the National Mental Health Survey.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2022

Questions are raised about an approach towards psychiatric epidemiology, which directly imports m... more Questions are raised about an approach towards psychiatric epidemiology, which directly imports models in medicine to count disorders of the mind to produce staggering evidence to the effect that 11% of Indians suffer from mental disorders. An alternative psychiatric epidemiology is needed, which relies on the principles of slow research, is value-based, and which defines mental health as an ethical and political problem.

Inculcating Democratic Policing in India: A Psychological Perspective

by Surendra Kumar Sia and Sudarshan R Kottai

Indian journal of positive psychology, 2013

Police is a vital oigan of public administration for they are entitled to secure the safety, secu... more Police is a vital oigan of public administration for they are entitled to secure the safety, security and dignity of citizens of the country. Police is entrusted to safeguard the lives and properties of the aggrieved. Police is the first step in the ladder of the criminal justice system who are responsible for upholding the human rights of each and every citizen. Hence, effective policing is imperative for the implementation of law and order and in building up of an institution ofjustice.Police administration in India cannot be dubbed as a success story. Even after 64 years of independence, the archaic Police Act of 1861 or acts modelled after it continue to govern policing in India. Police is still used as a coercive arm of the state utilising force to impose the law rather than providing a service to uphold the law. It is a shame for the world's largest democracy that instances of police inaction and passiveness have become the order of the day. Political blindness and biased ...

Mental health is a moral and ethical issue

The Hindu, 2024

Karthik, a driver at a university, was happy when I asked him how he feels on campus. “We are dri... more Karthik, a driver at a university, was happy when I asked him how he feels on campus. “We are drivers. So, nobody values us, Sir,” he replied. “The professors are elitist. They don’t even bother to greet us. They only mingle with people at their ‘level’”. Similarly, while I was alighting from an autorickshaw, the driver, Ajay, told me, “No other customer has talked to me like you did, Sir.” I asked him what the reason could be. “Who bothers to talk to a driver, Sir,” he replied. It is common to see people at the higher echelons of society cross paths with drivers and security guards and disregard them. To willfully not recognise someone is moral violence.

Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in IndiaEcksStefan

Sage eBooks, Sep 1, 2017

<i>‘Doctors advised to take medicines to remove these thoughts’:</i> the violence and violations in sexual mental health care in community mental health programmes in Kerala

Community development journal, Apr 3, 2024

https://connect.springerpub.com/content/sgrehpp/early/2024/08/28/ehpp-2023-0022

Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 2024

In the context of neoliberalism and increasing globalization, technocratization, and scientificat... more In the context of neoliberalism and increasing globalization, technocratization, and scientification of mental health care, people suffering from socio-politico-economic problems ranging from poverty to structural violence are often transmogrified into “patients” with mental health problems to be “treated” with psychopharmaceuticals and individualized psychological therapies. Drawing from three socio-political issues India witnessed in the past 3 years, concerning three marginalized sections, namely, farmers, LGBTQIA+ people, and migrant workers, I illustrate the silence of mainstream mental health disciplines in India on sheer instances of structural violence and social suffering. Deflection of attention from human rights violations by mainstream mental health systems raises critical questions about the ethics and politics of mental health disciplines. The social, political, and material contexts that are central to lived experiences are almost always unaccounted in mental health academia, research, and practice. Engaging people with lived experiences advances equity by breaking down power dynamics, establishing collaborative decision-making, and improving equitable outcomes. Thus, knowledge production in mental health becomes irrelevant to political action and transformative policies that are crucial for positive mental health outcomes. By ignoring and thus implicitly sanctioning discriminatory, exploitive neoliberal architecture, mental health systems maintain the very upstream factors that cultivate and sustain mental distress. In this way, mainstream mental health practice in India fails to undertake world-making, raising deeper questions in public mental health ethics.

Suicide Deaths in India Rethinking Mainstream Mental Health Narratives

Economic and Political Weekly, 2023

The narratives on suicide deaths by mainstream mental health systems frame it as an individual pr... more The narratives on suicide deaths by mainstream mental health systems frame it as an individual problem located within troubled brains and minds without opening up the dynamic between structural violence and lived experiences. The result is the continuous call to upscale access to mental health services to cure sick minds without attending to the sick social structures and systems that create fatal vulnerabilities. A decolonial suicidology is imperative to foreground the lifeworlds of marginalised people like migrant workers who are often targets of the burgeoning mental health industry in the current neo-liberal order.

Why IIT engineering students need social science training The Indian Express

The Indian Express, 2023

#1 Private Un 40% Tuition Fee Waiv for Top 20% Student pes.edu Why IIT engineering students need ... more #1 Private Un 40% Tuition Fee Waiv for Top 20% Student pes.edu Why IIT engineering students need social science training Technology, when applied inappropriately, indiscriminately, and without context could do more harm. Technologies that are value-based, locally relevant, ethical, and sensitive to contexts are assets to society News / Opinion / Columns / Why IIT engineering students need social science training Written by Sudarshan R Kottai

“Initially, medicines will be given, and then we need to study the case”: Medicalized perspectives about chronicity and mental health care in Kerala

Anthropology & Medicine

In response to the global call to upscale mental health services in low-income countries, mental... more In response to the global call to upscale mental health services in low-income countries, mental health non-governmental organisations (MHNGOs) have sprung up in Kerala to address mental health needs by partnering with pre-existing locally grown, bottom-up, community-led pain and palliative clinics (PPCs) to increase access to mental health care through task-shifting. The MHNGOs mandate filtering only patients with ‘severe mental disorders’ from low socioeconomic backgrounds for their free services. This eligibility criterion mandated by the MHNGO is ruffling feathers within the palliative clinics that oppose such classifications. They believe that suffering cuts across all divisions and should not be discriminated against based on economic background and severity of illnesses. When chronicity and suffering are held universal by the MHNGO and palliative care, respectively, it brings to the fore the enactment of two perspectives of care. Drawing on observations of clinical interactions between patients, MHNGO staff and mental health professionals and interviews with community volunteers of palliative care clinics in Kerala, this paper demonstrates how chronicity narrative promoted by MHNGOs based on biopsychiatric model gains hegemony, whereas the community care model loses traction progressively. The state, caught between these two narratives, frontstages development by submitting its health machinery to the MHNGOs flouting basic medical safety laws in its services to marginalised people like the tribal population. This paper argues that the rising dominance of chronicity narrative in community mental health clinics as well as in popular media discourses evolves out of power relations between the MHNGOs and the palliative clinics.

Evolving jurisprudence on conversion therapy: Reconsidering ethics in mental health systems

by Rajalakshmi RamPrakash and Sudarshan R Kottai

Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, 2023

Since the Delhi High Court judgement (2009), reading down IPC 377 that criminalised homosexuality... more Since the Delhi High Court judgement (2009), reading down IPC 377 that criminalised homosexuality, the Indian judiciary has been at the forefront of invoking constitutional morality to uphold LGBTQIA+ rights. In contrast, the mainstream mental health systems have failed to uphold human rights and protect LGBTQIA+ people ethically, except for a few position statements. Though the Supreme Court directed the mental health fraternity to exercise utmost sensitivity to LGBTQIA+ issues, they have not risen to the occasion. The absence of gender affirmative guidelines and failure to put in place punitive action against those practising conversion therapies set apart Indian mental health systems, in stark contrast to international mental health associations. Here, we review landmark judgments and the actions of professional mental health bodies regarding LGBTQIA+ rights in India, from 2009 to 2022 — especially those regarding conversion therapies and the discriminatory medical curriculum — to examine the deepening crisis of public health ethics.

On the cusp of ‘modernity’: Ayurveda’s tryst with ‘development’ in Nepal

Anthropology Book Forum, Oct 26, 2020

Book Review: Bisexual and pansexual identities: Exploring and challenging invisibility and invalidation by Nikki Hayfield

Feminism & Psychology

The private troubles that are told and retold in the clinic are cut off from the larger milieu of... more The private troubles that are told and retold in the clinic are cut off from the larger milieu of the person, a milieu consisting of communities, economy, politics, personal identities and state policies. Creating a human, humane, and more meaningful psychology means drawing from and understanding the historical, political, economic and local contexts that shape diverse ways of being in the world. Bisexual and Pansexual Identities does fulfil this goal evocatively in taking up psychology’s humongous, and delayed, ethical responsibility to throw light on the most marginalised within marginalised sexual subjects – asexual, bisexual, and plurisexual people.

Social Sensitivity of Mental Health Systems

Economic and Political Weekly, 2022

The NCRB data on suicides by daily wage earners underscore the social structural determinants of ... more The NCRB data on suicides by daily wage earners underscore the social structural determinants of mental well-being. Mental health systems ought to shed their apolitical and value-neutral stance in their quest to stay in the camp of medical science to develop what critical scholars call “outsight”—the humility to travel outside the four walls of the clinic centred around individual brains and minds to appreciate the complexities in the shared social world that incessantly shape the way we think, feel and act. It is high time we demanded a decolonial, social materialist, justice-informed knowledge of the mind that foregrounds affective experiences, for people are essentially feeling bodies enmeshed in the social and our distress, an acquired, embodied way of being in the world.

Unruly figures: Queerness, sex work, and the politics of sexuality in Kerala

Contemporary South Asia, 2021

This book stands out in the current environment because it tackles sexuality, a pressing issue of... more This book stands out in the current environment because it tackles sexuality, a pressing issue of contemporary India which most local scholarship steers clear of. It covers with equal emphasis the topic of sex work and lesbian love in ‘the fraught terrains of sexuality politics’ (187). Based on the highly mediated landscape of the south Indian state of Kerala, Mokkil foregrounds vernacular politics of sexuality by focusing on how marginalized sexual figures are produced in the public imagination through local cultural practices. Challenging the widely held belief that the visibility of sexuality is a function of globalization, Mokkil ‘firmly pushes against this linear history’ (6) by arguing that formations of sexuality have been continuously destabilized in Kerala’s postcolonial visual and literary practices. As it untangles the multiple threads of movement of sexual figures across time and space, this book is an invitation to explore internalized local flows and situated knowledge...

Farmers' Protests, Death by Suicides, and Mental Health Systems in India: Critical Questions

Ongoing farmers&#39; protests have once again brought back the spotlight on the agrarian cris... more Ongoing farmers&#39; protests have once again brought back the spotlight on the agrarian crisis in India. Even though upstream factors that perpetuate farmers&#39; suffering, including the role of the state in promoting agrocapitalism, have been discussed extensively by scholars and activists across the spectrum, mental health discourses almost always frame it as a mental health problem to be addressed by increasing access to psychopharmaceuticals. Drawing on developments around farmers&#39; protests and analysis of articles published in flagship journals of largest professional bodies of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists in India, I highlight the intimate relationship between neoliberal state and farmers&#39; distress to which the mental health system shuts its ears and eyes obscuring and downplaying socio-structural determinants of farmers&#39; mental health.

Fractured narratives of psy disciplines and the LGBTQIA+ rights movement in India: A critical examination

Indian journal of medical ethics, 2019

In 2018, a day before the Supreme Court of India commenced hearing the curative petition on Secti... more In 2018, a day before the Supreme Court of India commenced hearing the curative petition on Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (which criminalised �carnal intercourse against the order of nature�), the Indian Psychiatric Society (IPS) issued an official statement that homosexuality is not a mental pathology. In 2014, a year after the top court recriminalised homosexuality, the then IPS president had termed it as a pathology requiring treatment. By examining articles on LGBTQIA+ rights published in two flagship Indian journals in psychiatry and clinical psychology, position statements by professional bodies, and international and national developments in human rights mechanisms, we argue that psychiatry�s voice for human rights protection of the marginalised has been akin to whispering sweet nothings in tune with the juridico-penal system. In turn, clinical psychology appears to huddle with biomedical psychiatry without raising its voice against coercive and traumatising practices ...

How Kerala's poor tribals are being branded as 'mentally ill

Paternalistic governance of mental health practices and advocacy fail to locate mental health pro... more

Practice of family therapy in a heteronormative society of India from queer theory perspective

Open Journal of Psychiatry & Allied Sciences, 2017

In the present paper, we offer to introduce the concept of heteronormativity and its influence on... more In the present paper, we offer to introduce the concept of heteronormativity and its influence on family therapy interventions. We emphasis the dominant role heteronormativity has created over Indian families, that existence or emergence of queer concepts creates innumerable issues. Queer theory's perspective has been used to expand our knowledge and practice beyond the demarcation of heteronormativity. Finally, we emphasis the need of a shift in our therapeutic approaches too. Yet the question persists that are we ready to learn and adapt?

On the cusp of ‘modernity’: Ayurveda’s tryst with ‘development’ in Nepal

MARY CAMERON, 2019, Three Fruits: Nepali Ayurvedic Doctors on Health, Nature, and Social Change. ... more

Task-Shifting in Community Mental Health in Kerala: Tensions and Ruptures

Medical Anthropology, 2020

A mental health epidemic? Critical questions on the National Mental Health Survey.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2022

Questions are raised about an approach towards psychiatric epidemiology, which directly imports m... more Questions are raised about an approach towards psychiatric epidemiology, which directly imports models in medicine to count disorders of the mind to produce staggering evidence to the effect that 11% of Indians suffer from mental disorders. An alternative psychiatric epidemiology is needed, which relies on the principles of slow research, is value-based, and which defines mental health as an ethical and political problem.

Inculcating Democratic Policing in India: A Psychological Perspective

by Surendra Kumar Sia and Sudarshan R Kottai

Indian journal of positive psychology, 2013

Police is a vital oigan of public administration for they are entitled to secure the safety, secu... more Police is a vital oigan of public administration for they are entitled to secure the safety, security and dignity of citizens of the country. Police is entrusted to safeguard the lives and properties of the aggrieved. Police is the first step in the ladder of the criminal justice system who are responsible for upholding the human rights of each and every citizen. Hence, effective policing is imperative for the implementation of law and order and in building up of an institution ofjustice.Police administration in India cannot be dubbed as a success story. Even after 64 years of independence, the archaic Police Act of 1861 or acts modelled after it continue to govern policing in India. Police is still used as a coercive arm of the state utilising force to impose the law rather than providing a service to uphold the law. It is a shame for the world's largest democracy that instances of police inaction and passiveness have become the order of the day. Political blindness and biased ...

Book Review: Bisexual and pansexual identities: Exploring and challenging invisibility and invalidation by Nikki Hayfield

Feminism and Psychology, 2022

The private troubles that are told and retold in the clinic are cut off from the larger milieu of... more The private troubles that are told and retold in the clinic are cut off from the larger milieu of the person, a milieu consisting of communities, economy, politics, personal identities and state policies. Creating a
human, humane, and more meaningful psychology means drawing from and understanding the historical, political, economic and local contexts that shape diverse ways of being in the world. Bisexual and Pansexual Identities does fulfil this goal evocatively in taking up psychology’s humongous, and delayed, ethical responsibility to throw light on the most marginalised within marginalised sexual subjects – asexual, bisexual, and plurisexual people.

Book Review of Environmental Politics by Elizabeth DeSombre, Environment and Society, 2(1).

Environment and Society, 2021

What Is Environmental Politics? is a meticulously argued, conceptually engaging, and contextually... more

EPW Webinar on Methods of Understanding Mental Health in India

by Sudarshan R Kottai and Prateeksha Sharma

Economic and Political Weekly, 2023

According to WHO, the burden of mental health problems in India is 2443 disability-adjusted life ... more According to WHO, the burden of mental health problems in India is 2443 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per 10000 population; the age-adjusted suicide rate per 100 000 population is 21.1. The economic loss due to mental health conditions between 2012-2030 is estimated at USD 1.03 trillion. A study undertaken in the year 2016 by NIMHANS showed that nearly 15% of Indians above 18 years suffer from mental disorders. The method adopted was a multi-stage, stratified, random cluster sampling technique, with random selection based on Probability Proportion to Size at each stage. The Mini International Neuro-Psychiatric Inventory (MINI) adult version for adults and the MINI-Kid version for older children and adolescents for assessing mental morbidity. The research by NIMHANS presents a grim picture of the mental health discourse in India. However, the positivist approach adopted by the study undertaken by NIMHANS needs deeper interrogation as it is important to understand that the causes of mental disorders are not just rooted in structural biology but also in the very socioeconomic and political environment of the being. The survey claims to have adopted both qualitative and quantitative methods for the study; however, it is clearly evident that it is tilted more towards the quantitative aspect. The survey fails to take into consideration the lived realities of the masses and uses data as a justification for psychiatric intervention. One needs to be cautious of this kind of data determinism, as has been argued by Vincanne Adams (2016) that "[P]roducing metrical forms of accountability can displace other activities, other ways of knowing, and other ways of seeing, seeing other things." The methodology adopted by NIMHANS has been critiqued by many Indian scholars who have argued for an alternative approach (to understand the mental discourse in India) by relying on the principles of slow research. They argue for 'value-based research' and approach mental health as an 'ethical and political problem.'

Interrogating ‘Care’, ‘Chronicity’ and Expansion of Patienthood : Ethnographic encounters from community mental health programs in India

Culture and Community Mental Health and Global Mental Health Speaker Series https://www.mcgill.c... more

Mental Health and Migrant Workers-https://www.tiss.edu/view/5/hyderabad-campus/school-of-livelihoods-and-development/grameen-series-talk-1/

The COVID-19 pandemic in India has unraveled both the profound failures of governance and the soc... more The COVID-19 pandemic in India has unraveled both the profound failures of governance and the social fissures in our society. While the privileged Indians abroad were flown in at the expense of the government, an estimated 40 million migrant workers were left high and dry to fend for themselves. Money-less, transport-less, jobless, they walked thousands of kilometers in an attempt to reach their villages. Recorded as a massive human tragedy, not seen since the partition in 1947, the migrant workers were often victims of police brutality and hundreds are documented to have lost their lives.

One response of the state – which failed to provide transport, food, and water – was to offer tele counseling for ‘mental distress’, and offer pharmaceutical support through task-shifting. This talk will unwrap the politics of psy disciplines, especially as it is brought to bear in our country during the humongous crisis brought on by structural violence and social suffering; medicalizing, decontextualizing, depoliticizing and psychiatrizing these. Drawing from mental health policies, developments around COVID-19, and personal insights from mental health spaces, I will throw light on how mainstream mental health systems in India huddle with the state, in aggressively replacing social justice problems of vulnerable sections like migrant workers with a single story of ‘psychiatric disorders’.

https://www.tiss.edu/view/5/hyderabad-campus/school-of-livelihoods-and-development/grameen-series-talk-1/

Podcast on Socio-cultural Factors and Mental Health in India in Research Radio, Economic and Political Weekly-https://www.epw.in/engage/article/socio-cultural-factors-and-mental-health-india

Economic and Political Weekly, 2022

On this World Mental Health Day, we bring you a conversation with Sudarshan Kottai on Mental Heal... more On this World Mental Health Day, we bring you a conversation with Sudarshan Kottai on Mental Health in India and it’s entanglements with socio-cultural factors both in the provision of mental healthcare as well as within the institutions of mental health themselves.

Sudarshan Kottai teaches at the Jindal School of Psychology and Counselling, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat and has published several articles in EPW including, “How Kerala’s Poor Tribals Are Being Branded As 'Mentally Ill'”, “Migrant Workers and the Politics of Mental Health”, “A Mental Health Epidemic?: Critical Questions on the National Mental Health Survey”, and “Social Sensitivity of Mental Health Systems”.

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4K6k1wvhXzBHyJ7f3hmZDc?si=46edaf19cce442df