I first met Bhargavi Davar at a seminar in 2006 in Christ University, Bangalore. Bhargavi was a mental health activist, and I was a student gearing up for a career in clinical psychology or counselling.

We were learning about various therapies and pouring over each diagnostic category in manuals like the ICD and DSM. Bhargavi’s talk disrupted that formula. Here was a survivor, standing in front of a class of some thirty students in their early twenties, sharing her experience of how psychiatric treatment harmed her and many others like her. Dressed in a salwar kameez (trousers and tunic), her calm but firm voice mesmerised me.

Bhargavi spoke about how forced medication, ECT and therapy worked on the assumption that mentally ill people had to be treated and their madness gotten rid of. This challenged both conventional wisdom and psychological knowledge, going against everything I knew about psychology and the career I wanted as a therapist. It left me thinking for days. Even though I didn’t have the words to articulate it at the time, it challenged something deep within me. It was a catalyst in how I have come to view survivor activism and mad movements.

Bhargavi was an adult survivor of childhood exposure to mental asylums at a young age and she witnessed the brutality of the treatment her mother received. Affectionately nicknamed ‘Bapu’, her mother suffered greatly under the growing psychiatric system of post-independence India. Previous ‘treatments’ such as exorcisms had done little to help her either. Bhargavi’s story is familiar to anyone who has had a family member diagnosed as mentally ill and knows the struggles that follow. In most Indian families the affected family member becomes an embarrassment, hidden away from family, friends and neighbours.

For these reasons, Bhargavi set up the Bapu Trust (named after her mother). The Bapu Trust is an Indian Non-Governmental Organisation that runs community inclusion programs enabling the independence of persons living with mental health issues and psycho-social disabilities. Countless students, aspiring psychologists and social workers worked with Bhargavi and benefited from the work Bapu Trust undertakes. Bhargavi was a pioneer, her work on survivor research in India was and still is groundbreaking, tackling issues around policy, gender, institutionalisation and human rights in the mental health system in India.

Those of us who have the privilege of being exposed to Mad Studies, anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry sometimes take lived experience research and activism for granted. Challenging prejudice against people with a psychiatric diagnosis is draining, and the everyday battles to be recognised as human and credible are tiresome. In the past few years, we have lost several survivors who have helped shape activism, policy and scholarship. They need to know they are important, loved and appreciated for everything they’ve done to change the mental health system. Let’s keep the memory of Bhargavi and others like her alive, by making sure their work is known about in wider psychology/psychiatry systems.

Sonia Soans is a critical psychologist and a member of the Asylum Magazine collective.

Twitter @PSYfem

This is a sample article from the Autumn 2024 issue of Asylum Magazine (31.3).  To read more. . .  Subscribe to Asylum.