In Manipur, people go to the psychiatrist only when patients have lost their minds completely and have become insane. Many of the dysfunctional behaviours for which people in the West seek the help of psychiatrists are not given much attention here. As for instance, adolescents not getting along well with their parents, sudden drops in school performances, substance abuse, delinquency, inordinate anxiety, stress, depression and even rising incidents of hypertension, migraine, stomach ulcers, etc, all would have been matters that called for professional counselling in Western societies and not just sought to be remedied with pain killer pills or vitamin tablets. Not so here. This is partly because in traditional societies like ours, the community has its own internal mechanisms to provide counsels. Every elder is an uncle, aunt, brother, sister, grandmother etc, who in their own ways can exercise moderating influences on the wayward. Increasingly, this traditional world is transitioning to the modern with rapid urbanisation, yet the culture of seeking professional help to deal with these dysfunctions has still not caught up. In other words, though official records may not show it, Manipur could be sitting on a disguised time bomb of mental issues. This is not to say the psychiatry wards in the hospitals in Manipur are not showing a general upswing of patients. Surely amidst the prolonged state of spiralling lawlessness this is only to be expected. The matter is serious and should deserve meaningful pursuits by scholars and academic oriented NGOs. In all likelihood, the perennial state of mayhem, overbearing decrees and threats of physical injury and elimination have already cumulatively become a cause for chronic and extremely alarming health hazards.
Come to think of it, what would a day in the life of an average man, woman or even child in the state be like? From dawn to dusk, information which get registered in their consciousness are those of violence, aggressions, threats and diktats or else varied visages of laments and protests. They literally go to sleep with news and images of kidnaps, abductions and bloody encounters on the local cable TV channel, and then wake up the next morning to be greeted by pictures and news of more blood and gore staring back at them from the pages of morning newspapers. Average parents of school-going children for instance have not only to fight the clock to pack off their children to school in time and in order each morning, but also to desperately scan the pages of the local newspapers to find out whether the day is clear of bandh or blockade calls, lest their children get caught in senseless troubles and dangers.
Thirty years ago, such crimes would have elicited the bewildered response from everybody as unthinkable and impossible in Manipur. Today even the most naive and trusting grandmothers would accept these as Manipur`™s beastly new reality. Once upon a time, the moderating influences of religions and together with it a belief in a benign divine order were deeply institutionalised in the society. Back then, it did not always take the law to convince people the basics of what are wrong and right, or what are acceptable behaviours and what are not. Law keeping then was not so impossibly arduous or complex. The venerated space in society that elders once enjoyed, the respect reserved for women and the universal protective instinct for children, have all waned. It is not just the law which has been turned on its head, but the intuitive values built over aeons as well. Something went wrong somewhere down the line and there was nobody to arrest the trend. A lot of it probably had to do with the wayward ways of those in charge of the establishment. Official corruption must have been the first blow to shake up faith in social values painstakingly nurtured over generations. The law was the next casualty, and its moral authority and hold over the people loosened, leading them to take it into their own hands. There was also, in certain quarters, a sinister and cynical intellectual eagerness to destroy established institutions on the pretext that they were degenerate, before new credible ones could be built. The fact sheet at this moment would show values of traditional and instinctual jurisprudence, as well as the moral hold of legal institutions of the establishment, effectively decimated, but their replacements still not born. This destructive mindset is also notoriously blind to reason, unthinking of consequences, overbearing, authoritarian, undemocratic, hate-driven and obdurately hegemonic. Before it becomes too late, Manipur must address these issues in earnest.
Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam
Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/06/unheeded-social-dementia/