Trigger Warning: Mentions of suicide, mental health issues
According to the Ministry of Education Data, from 2014-2021, the IITs recorded 34 deaths by suicides, of which 18 were from SC and OBC communities [1]. In the 2011 documentary Death of Merit, Dalit rights activist Anoop Kumar said that a significant section of those who committed suicides in the IITs between 2007 and 2011 were dalits [2].
Even the data on student dropout shows that most students belong to SC/ST/OBC categories. It is no hidden fact that students from the SC/ST community face immense harassment and discrimination on the campus from savarna students, faculties, and employees. Several students have reported cases of institutional discrimination and explicit threats from teachers in the recent past.
In April 2021, Seema Singh, a professor in the humanities and social science department of IIT Kharagpur, was heard openly hurling abuses at an English preparatory class for SC/ST students. These institutional and casual ways of casteism cause mental and psychological stress on students, and IITs do not provide any mechanisms to help them.
Even though many IITs have counselling and mental health services available, they are designed only to cater for the needs of savarna students. Moreover, these counsellors are not sensitised to understand the social realities of caste that affect students from SC/ST communities, rendering them inadequate to offer support or, at times, aggravating students’ troubles. Furthermore, IITs do not hire mental health experts from Dalit Bahujan Adivasi (DBA) communities as counsellors, further exacerbating the situation.
Recently, APPSC IIT Bombay have brought out an old social media post of Hima Anaredy, the head counsellor of the Student Wellness Centre (SWC) of IIT Bombay, where she is openly passing anti-reservation remarks and questioning the ‘merit’ of the students availing reservation [3]. This is the only textual public post on her Facebook page for the past seven years.
Students feel intimidated and uncomfortable talking about their mental health issues to such a person who is openly propagating casteist views against a constitutional provision for representation of underrepresented communities. It makes her incompetent to provide mental health support.
Many institute DBA students said they did not approach SWC after seeing this Facebook post. The most significant chunk of caste-based harassment students face at these elite campuses is due to the anti-reservation sentiment prevalent, and such posts by those in charge of student wellness make life miserable for DBA students.
Students allege a clear caste bias in how the SWC treats a savarna student and a DBA student. For example, one student says that when his friend who was upper caste went to see the counsellor, he was made to feel better and comfortable. Still, when he went to the same counsellor, she used the merit argument often and kept insinuating that he was not intelligent enough, even saying, “I don’t think you can handle it”.
The student started suffering from imposter syndrome after going to this counsellor. Experiences like these slowly chip away confidence, removing the sense of belongingness and making one feel inadequate, alienated and depressed.
Most students feel that the counsellors hired by IIT are neither competent nor sensitive enough to help them with their mental health issues. One student says he went to one of the counsellors for one and a half years and met her regularly every two weeks.
It started with the standard therapy, but once he opened up about insecurity about his JEE rank, she immediately responded, “I guessed that”. She ignored the other issues he had concerning his childhood, only focused on his JEE rank, and claimed that all his issues stemmed from a lack of confidence. He says that he was misdiagnosed. She was of no help and sent him to the institute clinical psychiatrist, who gave “stingy” medicines which were useless.
Another student explains the ordeal he had to undergo in his final semester, “I was under too much stress. I lost my grandfather recently and had to complete 48 credits. So one day, I called her on the phone when I was feeling too much anxiety, and she tried to calm me down. But the next day, when I met her, she started scolding me, saying, “You are playing the victim.”
I was so shocked and cried during the entire session while she just said, “I am not sorry for telling you this.” It was such a traumatic experience that it destroyed him mentally. He later took multiple sessions with two therapists outside IIT to overcome this trauma and self-doubt of “am I playing the victim”.
They even push academically strong students into depression. A student says that when the topper in his batch went to SWC to talk about his problems at home, the counsellor gave such bad suggestions that it worsened his situation. Instead of helping, these counsellors are digging the graves of DBA students.
Bandhu, an alumni-led mental health initiative in IIT Bombay, is another counselling body which lacks caste sensitisation while dealing with DBA students. Even though the Bandhu program understands how harassment due to gender and sexual orientation identities can affect mental health, they deny caste impacts a student’s mental health or wellness.
Even after constant requests from various student groups of IIT Bombay to be more caste aware, the Bandhu initiative has refused to include caste as a factor in mental health issues. It is clear that the savarna alumni of IITs only want to fund programs that cater to the needs of savarna students.
There is also a clear lack of awareness among students about various mental health issues, and many stigmas are still associated with availing of mental health services. Peers sometimes harass students for even availing of mental health support. In such an environment, insensitive, casteist and discriminatory behaviour of campus counsellors are shutting the hope of DBA students in finding good mental health services.
Mental health is still taught and practised as an illness devoid of social factors, and the onus on getting better falls solely on the individual. They function under the assumption that all mental health issues are caused not by social structures that oppress individuals but due to chemical imbalances in the brain. The oppressive social structures and power hierarchies present in our educational institutes and society are completely ignored when dealing with students’ mental health issues [4].
“We are told from day one that we are abled-bodied/able-minded humans who must at all cost work hard and propagate the myth of meritocracy. Thus, the lone student from a marginalised community who scores high is celebrated as a PR story. In contrast, reports on student suicides, particularly from marginalised communities, are ignored as depression stories. This false binary of separating depression from oppression/of suggesting multiple causes of depression shows how the State and this society are only interested in washing their hands off.” [4]
Counselling centres like the SWC and Bandhu wash off the institution’s responsibility for the harassment and discrimination faced by the students. The students who approach these services to talk about the harassment they suffer are made to believe that the issues they face are “just in their head”.
They are made to open up about other personal issues so that the focus is shifted to their individual problems rather than the institute. This becomes a convenient tool to wash off institutional responsibility in case of a suicide where the counsellors can provide a clean chit to the institute saying that the suicide was due to personal and psychological issues.
The IITs/IIMs have been brushing off suicides under the carpet for years, blaming it on the individual student as a case of depression in a “weak student” who could not “cope with the rigorous academic environment”, and these mental health services are a means to aid that process [5].
The documentary series ‘Death Of Merit’ recorded 18 Dalit student suicides between 2007-2011, along with the interviews with parents of these students[6]. It is clear from these interviews that students who faced discrimination sought psychological help and were diagnosed with depression. When the families demanded enquiry on the structural discrimination faced by these students, the institutes cited the students’ depression as evidence against families’ claims, rendering invisible the institutional violence that led to the students’ psychological distress. The practice of psychological diagnoses becomes complicit in the institutional framework that actively refuses to acknowledge caste discrimination [5].
These premier institutes clearly understood mental health when IISc replaced ceiling fans in hostels with wall-mounted fans and restricted students’ access to terraces and narrow balconies to stop suicides[7]. Similarly, IIT Madras installed a suicide prevention device in the ceiling fans to prevent suicides, as if the ceiling fans were the primary causes of suicides. [8] The actions of these self-proclaimed ‘meritorious’ people shed light on the pitiable understanding of the issue and their so-called “solutions” to address a structural issue of institutional oppression.
One of the causes of students’ depreciating mental health issues is the vitamin B12 deficiency caused by vegetarian foods [9]. The vitamin B12 found in meat sources like fish and liver far outstrip the levels found in vegetarian foods. The glorification of ‘pure’ vegetarian food and the harassment faced for eating meat can also push students to consume less vitamin B12-rich food, exacerbating the mental health issues already caused by casteist harassment and discrimination. They are not even allowed to eat their food in peace.
Only 3% of faculty in IITs come from SC/ST communities, and the lack of faculty from similar communities further adds to the woes of DBA students[10]. Moreover, the student-faculty interactions invariably favour the savarna students due to the everyday experiences shared with savarna faculties.
Even in mental health awareness programs, the role-play situations are designed to suit the savarna lifestyles, which DBA students cannot connect with. Unable to relate to the savarna experiences in the campus and classroom, students from DBA communities suffer from a divided sense of self, resulting in self-rejection and painful feelings of abandonment and exclusion [11].
Since the field of psychiatry is dominated by savarnas, they tend to label the psychological impact of oppressive experiences as the fault of individual over-sensitivity, or as irrational responses on their part, while ignoring the social hierarchies, such as caste, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or religion, that creates inequities through power relations and cause feelings of inferiority. Here the individual’s suffering becomes an “objective” point, placed outside of its caste-culture context [11].
Mental health education should be seen as an elite discipline because access to its services and resources is available mainly to the savarnas. They reject the mental health issues of people from the lower castes by subjugating them and degrading their value as individuals. The experiences of DBA remain absent from mental health discourses, intensifying their exclusion.
At the same time, the savarnas set the standards of “normality” for personality and behaviour derived from their savarna realities and sensibilities. Mental health frameworks exacerbate existing oppressions when they fail to apply principles of social justice while engaging with DBA individuals [11].
The problems faced by DBA students do not end with the implementation of affirmative action policies but in recognising that caste is experienced in everyday practices, such as segregation of living spaces, institutional support for harassment, bureaucratic labelling as “category students”, and the continual characterisation of student depression and suicide as lack of capacity in education [5].
Mental health practitioners and policymakers must recognise how current psychiatric practice and policy can harm DBA students. New confidentiality policies must allow DBA students to get care even without a diagnosis of depression as a prerequisite. Mental health policy must diversify resources to more than diagnosis and medication by recognising existing networks of care like Ambedkarite student bodies within institutes.
They can promote the therapeutic outcomes of group therapy, such as expression of psychological distress, recognition that students are not alone in their experience, reducing self-blame, and organisation for collaborative advocacy. Policies should also centre psychological support around Dalit cultures of resistance to everyday casteism and violence under caste regulation. Mental health practitioners who are ‘experts’ in the psychosocial effects of caste discrimination will be critical to such efforts. As a result, students will feel comfortable confiding in them, leading to better mental health outcomes [5].
“The process of producing knowledge without a critical consciousness of caste hierarchy – including within the educational institute – becomes an instrument of exploitation by creating a market of elitist myths about knowledge itself. The majority of educational institutes are, in this manner, complicit in the transmission of dominant ideologies in the classroom. – Rajesh Pawar [11]”
Images are for representational purposes only
If you are facing mental health issues and want to reach out, here is a list of caste-aware mental health support:
References
[1] R. Radhika, “58% student suicides in IITs, NITs, central institutions from SC, ST, OBC, minority communities,” careers360, [Online]. Available: https://news.careers360.com/iit-delhi-madras-kharagpur-nit-iisc-bengaluru-iiser-sc-st-obc-suicides-dharmendra-pradhan-parliament.
[2] C. Bahri, “If IITs Had More Dalit Professors, Would Aniket Ambhore Be Alive?,” IndiaSpend, 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.indiaspend.com/if-iits-had-more-dalit-professors-would-aniket-ambhore-be-alive-69867.
[3] A. BILLADAKATH, “Caste reservation should go….” Head counsellor’s casteist remarks trigger row in IIT Bombay,” Maktoob, [Online]. Available: https://maktoobmedia.com/2022/06/14/caste-reservation-should-go-head-counselors-casteist-remarks-trigger-row-in-iit-bombay/.
[4] T. N. Collective, “Is Depression just Depression?,” Notes on the Academy, [Online]. Available: https://notacademy.in/2022/05/29/depression-is-not-just-clinical-depression/.
[5] V. Komanapalli and D. Rao, “The mental health impact of caste and structural inequalities in higher education in India,” Transcultural Psychiatry, vol. 58, no. 3, p. 392–403, 2021.
[6] “The death of Merit,” [Online]. Available: https://thedeathofmeritinindia.wordpress.com/.
[7] “IISc Bangalore replaces ceiling fans with wall-mounted fans to prevent student suicides in hostels,” India Today, [Online]. Available: https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/news/story/iisc-bangalore-replaces-ceiling-fans-with-wall-mounted-fans-to-prevent-student-suicides-in-hostels-1890069-2021-12-20#:~:text=IISc%20Bangalore%20has%20replaced%20ceiling,three%20of%20them%20by%20hanging.
[8] J. Deeksha, “IIT Madras to install suicide-prevention device on hostel fans, after fallout over Fathima’s suicide,” Edex Live, [Online]. Available: https://www.edexlive.com/news/2019/nov/22/iit-madras-to-install-suicide-prevention-device-on-hostel-fans-after-fallout-over-fathimas-suicide-9214.html.
[9] S. K. Shetty, “Why vegetarians should worry about vitamin B12 intake,” [Online]. Available: https://www.livemint.com/news/business-of-life/why-vegetarians-should-worry-about-vitamin-b12-intake-1540554245498.html.
[10] “Less Than 3% of All Faculty Members at IITs Are SC/ST,” The Wire, [Online]. Available: https://thewire.in/education/less-than-3-of-all-faculty-members-at-iits-are-sc-st#:~:text=Of%20the%206%2C043%20faculty%20members,and%2021%20from%20Scheduled%20Tribes.&text=New%20Delhi%3A%20Less%20than%203,categories%2C%20the%20Centre%20has%20said..
[11] R. Pawar, “Freeing Today’s Class(room) from Caste,” Mariwala Health Initiative, [Online]. Available: https://mhi.org.in/voice/details/freeing-todays-classroom-caste/.