Recently I saw the "exploring madness" series of short films by Dr. Parvez Imam. He is a psychiatrist and a documentary film maker. The films are very brief, each lasting 3-4 minutes only.
The one I liked most was where he talked about women who are brought to a mental health centre and left there by the family. Often, the families give a wrong address. After a few months, when the women is cured or is better, they want to go out but the law does not allow them to go out. Their only way to go out is if some family member comes to take them and for many of them, no one ever comes to take them back so they are doomed to wait for ever. It was heart rending to listen to the women who kept on saying, she had two children and she wanted to go back to her family.
I appreciated that the film respects the privacy of persons it interviews. And I like the briefness of films. Even in their briefness, they make a clear point and touch the heart. I think that it requires a deep understanding of the theme and a strong empathy, to come up with something like this.
In the film, a lawyer tells about the laws relating to mental illness. If you are declared mentally ill, you lose all your civil rights, including the right to vote or to marry. It is justifiable reason for divorce. So like those women doomed to eternal wait for the families to come back and take them, you need someone else to take care of you. But you can be cured of mental illness. Doesn't the law allow you to regain your civil rights once the doctor treating you has certified that you are cured? That sounds very cruel and unfair!
While watching the film I remembered some episodes from a period of life, that I had almost forgotten. It was the time when I was a PG in anaesthesia at Willingdon hospital (later Dr Ram Manohar Lohia hospital) in Delhi. Some times there were calls from the mental health unit accross the Tal Katora road and sometimes, I did go there to provide anaesthesia for persons receiving electric shocks (ECT). As shocks also produce convulsions in the body, through anaesthesia, you can relax the muscles so that they don't get hurt or pains afterwards.
I was thinking that I had never stopped on the way to look around in the mental health unit. It was only rushing to the ECT room and back. Perhaps, just the sight of ECT scared me so much that I didn't want to think about it?
