Mental health legislation in contemporary India: the need for inter-sectoral dialogue

Abstract

It is said that war is far too serious a matter to be left to the generals alone. The same could be said for the interface between law and mental health. With our narrow, and sometimes myopic, treatment-centric vision we are ill equipped to claim hegemony over the complex domain of legislation as it relates to mental health, even more so in the multicultural Indian subcontinent, where the medieval exists alongside the modern and where abject poverty jostles with ostentatious wealth: ‘The mental health scene in India at the dawn of the twenty-first century is a bewildering mosaic of immense impoverishment, asymmetrical distribution of scarce resources, islands of relative prosperity intermixed with vast areas of deprivation, conflicting interests and the apparent apathy of governments and the governed alike.’ (Goel et al, 2004)