14th September 1997

An onslaught on mental health

By Malini Balasingham

In Sri Lanka we have a strong verbal networking system. There are strong nodal points. "Tell so and so and word will get around faster than an item in the newspapers" is a familiar saying that is frequently aired in the women’s club I belong to. I bet it’s the same at the local bar or office cafeteria. The emotional impact of hearsay however is mild compared to first hand exposure.

Tuning into observations such as "when my husband leaves for office, I am never sure whether he will come back of not" or "his son was arrested for speeding past a check point" is less likely to cause even fleeting spasms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, (PTSD), than when you find your own self about to be whisked into a police van and driven off without a word of explanation, quite apart from a by your leave.

This happened to me only the other day. My first reaction, after dispensing with the normal mental assumption that "this kind of thing happens to other people, never to oneself," and overcome my astonishment, was to activate a communication pipe line before I was transported into oblivion. Over- reaction? Yes and no. Several examples of similar experiences tumbled out of my sub-conscious mind. The nearest channel of communication was my driver Anthony, snoozing away in the van nearby. As we passed I asked if we could stop for a moment for me to retrieve my handbag. The somewhat bemused looking police woman sitting next to me agreed, and while the transaction took place, I asked Anthony to get back to the office and ask Sheila, our secretary, to make a couple of strategic telephone calls.

As we proceeded to the police station, I made polite inquiries as to what this was all about. The police officer equally politely declined to answer, then changed his mind and mumbled something about Mr. A, at the Registration of Persons Office. This is where I had been hauled in, while in the painful process of trying to justify my claim to citizenship.

The arrest was in response to a complaint that I had copied a notice publicly displayed on the wall. This puzzled me more than ever. Why display notices in public if you don’t want the public to make note of them? In fact the information in question had been carried in all mass media channels for many weeks and months. I had been impressed by the orderly manner in which it was displayed, and thought it would make a good filler for an article on development and devolution etc. With this in mind I borrowed a pencil and scribbled down the list of priority programmes on the back of a fax from Malaysia, where I was bound within 10 days, to attend a Congress on Psycho-social Rehabilitation.

All I could presume was that Mr. A had, like many a mental trauma prone public servant, matched my deed with the information he possessed about me, i.e. the name Balasingam, claiming to be a career journalist, my never having possessed an ID card, or a birth certificate, having been born in India, (where no such civic document was available in the 1920s) having no immediate family in Sri Lanka, or apparently any means to authenticate my citizenship. The only plus point was that of having to be classified as a vintage or retired subversive, who had at some point of time crept into Sri Lanka from India through the back door. In other words an oddity.

When we reached our destination, the policemen around the place also seemed to be subject to stress, on what was, I presumed, a customarily busy morning. Citizens who came in to transact business of one kind or another, also, somewhat more understandably, showed signs of anxiety, which after a certain point is classified as a mild mental illness. Next the young police woman, possibly trained to display no signs of emotion, asked me to hand over all my valuables, and helped me to count my money. We tugged at the bangles on my arm, which stubbornly refused to ride over my knuckles and gave up. This was the first indication I had that I was under arrest. If my mental health thermometer had not been registering a norm, I could have succumbed to panic reaction. So perhaps it was fortunate that at this point good friends came in and relieved the suppressed tension. I did, while we were waiting for the next move, give serious thought to the position of someone who did not have access to communication channels, or had been terrified out of their wits. No wonder our rate of trauma is steeply on the rise, and suicide rate recorded as one of the highest in the world, not taking into account attempted suicide and cyanide consumption.

Taking the pulse of what was occurring around me, I felt that a Harvard Report on the pending epidemic of suicide was not necessary to flash warning signals of spreading mental malaise. The majority of our population live, and will probably continue to live for some time to come in a mental trauma ridden social environment.

Certainly palatives such as watching cricket and street dramas provide mild therapy, but more substantive responses are demanded. Much more is amiss that what three dozen psychiatrists, 4 clinical psychologists, 6 psychiatric social workers, counsellors and NGO personnel can make a dent in. We need residential rehabilitation homes, day care facilities and half way houses, not bars, fast food outlets and advertising gimmicks to stem the tide of mental ill health.

What better time that right away to launch a National Mental Health Week. The date is set for October 10-16 - a very short time span, in which to initiate activities, create methodologies to promote public awareness, and lobby for higher priority to be given both in the government and NGO sectors, to mental health care and the human rights of the mentally ill. A desirable approach would be education on mental health in both the formal and non-formal sectors, in order to overcome ingrained stigma, and attention to prevailing shortcomings in treatment and therapy that tend to be avoided or shelved for the time being.

Personally I am most relieved that the title of this article is not "Musing in a detention cell," that it may have been if not for timely recognition, treatment and rehabilitation from a mini mishap, which threatened to lead to mild PTSD.

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