Introduction
Earlier this month, The Red Door invited me to MH360, a mental health festival. In our youth-led panel, “Pride X: The Personal is the Political,” we, the young people, talked about our lived experiences and how intersectional marginalisation impacts our emotional, psychological, and physical well-being.
Mental health and the therapy space are inherently political. Being queer and autistic impacts all walks of my life, and my fundamental right to live with safety and dignity. So, it’s quite impossible to divorce mental health from politics.
Furthermore, society and the bio-medical model individualise and pathologise our trauma and distress, ultimately placing the burden on us to heal and navigate systemic exclusion, further isolating us. As vulnerable and marginalised individuals, our exclusion is due to the barriers in society, not due to inadequacies within us. Ideally, we should celebrate diversity; we shouldn’t punish people for being different or force them to conform, as this may lead to more trauma.
A Minority within a Minority - Hameeda’s Experience as a Non-binary Muslim Woman
As a Shia Muslim woman born and raised in Saudi Arabia, Hameeda’s identity was a matter of life and death. The country had an open secret – Shias weren’t allowed the privilege of living comfortably, and at times, simply living. Non-Saudi Shias risked deportation to their home countries. The political climate deeply impacted their daily lives and existence.
As they grew older and migrated to India, they experienced similar levels of discrimination from Muslims of other sects. They realised that much of the discrimination originated from othering, the inability to consider the “other” as one’s own.
They felt religion provided a respite in suffering this form of isolation – by considering God their friend and supporter. However, the feelings of isolation converted into suicidal tendencies. They immediately sought support from a mental health professional. In the first meeting itself, the professional told them that God does not exist, and much of what they were suffering from was a chemical imbalance, rather than a collective issue. Their social upbringing and their experiences of systemic exclusion were not taken into account.
The amplification and taunting of the feeling of otherness left them lost and disconnected from reality. Moreover, it instilled in them a desire for deep, intentional support — from the religious community within which they faced discrimination and from the mental health professional community, where their reality felt trivial and unimportant.
The discourse on the personal being the political became a discourse on having empathetic, nurturing communities and systems of care from professionals, caregivers, and common acquaintances. It became a call for everyone around them to consider personal, lived experiences as opportunities for re-imagining political and systemic safety for minorities within a minority. In the panel, Hameeda detailed this approach and called for gentler listening among each other.
Queerness, Caste and Inter-generational Trauma - Meenal’s Lived Experience
Meenal, one of the panellists, who is also a practising counselling psychologist, talked about her master’s dissertation, wherein she found that statistics indicate that the young Indian Queer population as a whole faces mental health outcomes which are worse than their cisgender-heterosexual counterparts. For example, she quoted the following data:
- 60% of the Queer respondents were facing moderate, severe or extremely severe depression, as compared to 37% of the Cis-het respondents.
- 71% of the Queer respondents were experiencing moderate, severe or extremely severe anxiety, as compared to 53% Cis-het respondents.
- About half the Queer respondents were facing moderate, severe or extremely severe stress, as compared to 38% Cis-het respondents.
- Additionally, the levels of depression, anxiety, stress experienced by the Queer population were also higher than those experienced by the Cis-het population on average, and the levels of resilience lower.
- Women in the Cis-het group showed lower resilience by approximately 3 points.
She also talked about intergenerational trauma related to her caste location. Many people are unfamiliar with the term ‘intergenerational trauma,’ so Meenal made an effort to simplify it by explaining through a personal example.
Meenal’s grandmother, born into a discriminated family, endured a life marked by daily struggles, discrimination, and violence. This harsh environment likely led to negative mental health outcomes, shaping her body chemistry. When Meenal’s mother conceived her, she inherited this altered chemistry, receiving signals of survival struggles rather than care. Born into a discriminatory society, Meenal’s mother faced her own set of challenges, compounding the generational stress. Pregnant with Meenal, the cycle persisted, intensifying the cumulative impact of discrimination on mental health across generations. This narrative illustrates the enduring repercussions of societal discrimination on individuals’ psychological well-being through successive family generations.
While these experiences send chills down one’s body, there’s some good news. Meenal’s study found a link between openly acknowledging one’s marginalised identity and higher resilience. Literature in psychology also suggests that being open about one’s identity reduces depression, which is inversely related to resilience, ultimately leading to increased resilience. Thus, the way ahead may be to stop being shameful of one’s identity and start ‘Coming Out’ about any and all your marginalised identities. And how can that be possible? Once again, most of the layers shaping this idea are societal and political.
Better mental health outcomes are possible for marginalised groups if they receive:
- Institutional support: not mandating the declaration of gender, surname/caste, religion, etc. in any documents or for accessing support or accommodations —a right of every individual; mental health care should be provided through community healthcare models, like PHCs, CHCs; insurance/reimbursement for counselling services, etc.
- Community support: ensuring that the individual can find and access people similar to them; through awareness-building and formation of formal and informal networks at the community level.
- Social support: support from loved ones, friends, and family through making them aware of both the challenges and strengths associated with having that marginalised identity.
- Personal support: it consists of two parts – first is the ability to freely engage in any spiritual beliefs and practices, even through religion, without harming anyone or fearing harm to themselves, and second is being able to access mental healthcare.
As shared earlier, all these methods of achieving good mental health outcomes are strongly intertwined with social, political, and environmental outcomes, which bring home the point that the personal is political.
Conclusion
As social beings, everyone deserves support and care, so do queer and disabled people. This collective care can only be co-created with each other. Coming from a place of marginalisation with a traumatic past, we may hurt each other. The crucial task is to actively transform that pain and grow together to build solidarities.
For this, we have to humanise each other, and practice self as well as mutual accountability. Unless we build strands of solidarity amongst us, we can’t fight systemic issues by individualising them and putting the onus on marginalised folks.
We can’t achieve collective liberation in isolation. None of us are free until all of us are free.
Soumya Mishra is a neuroqueer and autistic person and has an interest in leveraging digital mediums to amplify marginalised voices, bridge existing gaps, and promote inclusivity and accessibility. They made a career switch during the pandemic from content writing to the development sector.
As an Oxfam fellow, Soumya develops her podcast —Atypical Dikkatein—to chronicle the stories of queer-disabled folx in India.
