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Beyond The Cukoo's Nest

Anjali, a Kolkata based NGO working for the rehabilitation and welfare of the mentally challenged people recently put up a show of three photographers. This exhibition of photographs is an eye opener for those ‘normal’ people who push away the issues pertaining to the mentally challenged from the ken of attention, says C.S.Venkiteswaran.

Give me a break now
To savour the flow of joy in an open meadow –
Oh, give me a break now
(from a poem by Shaktipada Jana, An Anjali Rehab Participant)

According to Kerala State Mental Health Authority, there are 18,46,640 persons with psychiatric disorders in the state, which works out to an alarming average of 58 per thousand population. Against this, we have only a handful of institutions to address the issue: for instance, there are only 1714 beds if you put together all the government institutions in this sector that includes mental hospitals, and psychiatric wards in medical colleges and general hospitals. This is only an indicator of our attitude to this huge problem.

Though almost every one of us know or are related to a mentally challenged person in our lives, we consider it a 'personal' tragedy or misfortune; something to be hidden away, forgotten, put behind, ashamed of. We just want 'them' to be silent, invisible and better kept away from 'our' 'normal' lives. We consider it a personal or family misfortune that has befallen us rather than as a social problem, and we have thoroughly failed in creating institutional and humane solutions for it. They are constantly ridiculed by us in our films, daily talk, and media; we stone them or lock them away if they have no one to look after them, and if they are related to us, we make them invisible, some way or other. We have been systematically denying them their basic human rights - the right to travel and move about, express themselves and pursue interests of their choice. They are not even given the right over their own bodies. It is this veil of shame, secrecy and self deception on our part that gets diabolic expression in the huge structures of indifference, darkness, and humiliation that our health' institutions are at present.

The photography show at Thiruvananthapuram – Beyond the Cukoo's Nest – put up by Anjali a Kolkata-based NGO working in the area of mental health, rips open this shroud-like veil that we take refuge in. The show consists of the works of three photographers, Achinto, Anita Khemka and Shumona Goel. Achinto has been photographing the mentally-ill for the last 17 years, and works as a volunteer in Asha Niketan, a community of mentally challenged people and Anita Khemka was inspired to photograph the mentally ill due to her close ties with her mentally challenged cousin Guddi.

These poignant photographs bring us face to face with the lonely despair and the trauma of being a mentally challenged person in India. Arranged in three sections, these photographs tell a heart-wrenching story of our inhumanity; about what we do to people we brand 'insane'. They all have a terribly vacant stare in their face, stares that have lost the capacity to look and see. These eyes are blank and have lost touch with the flow and glow of life, and seem to be stranded in a dark tunnel that leads nowhere. We have forsaken them to impersonal institutions and inhuman medical practices that push them further into the dark abyss. Those lost stares are searching for us, their skinny hands are groping in the dark and reaching out to a kind and human contact, one we adamantly and blindly refuse to lend.

No doubt, many of them are ill and need medical attention and treatment, but more than that, they need our love, care and attention. Only by recognizing them as human beings like us can we begin to find solutions. It has to come from the realization that it is we who are part of the problem and not them.