The Indian Mental Health Circus: Is Therapy For India?
What Indian Mental Health Is Missing
I recently listened to therapist Vienna Pharaon on The Grey Area with Sean Illing podcast, in an episode titled ‘Breaking Our Family Patterns’. What strikes me is that a good therapist has to firstly be humble and open to the way human nature is full of surprises. I don’t see that in the mental health rhetoric in India. This spans therapists, medical professionals, activists and therapy champions.
Mental health professionals in India often project a disturbing arrogance, rooted in the country’s class-conscious culture. The top 5%—those with the privilege of elite education and professional access—dominate the field. They carry their privilege with either blindness or defensiveness. Their approach is “I know everything everything and I know best and this is about slotting you into my vocabulary”. Humility is missing and it is so vital for trust, that bedrock of good mental health.
Each of us wrestles with questions of identity in a rapidly changing society. Therapy is a social construct to serve as a solution to social issues. It should adapt to fit the specific cultural & social systems of India. Instead, we have a blindly imported system touted by champions who will not acknowledge their bias or the system’s inherent flaws.
The Weaponisation of Mental Health
India is in one of the most polarised times in its independent history, divided along the lines of god & power. We are pushed to pick a side in the most binary of ways. So aligning with one idea means rejecting everything that is not associated with it. Can Indian mental health survive this battering in the face of propaganda and agenda-pushing?
For instance, meditation is not the domain of any one religion or culture. It exists in different ways across the world. Exercise has always been helpful in regulating some hormones which impact mood. Repetitive chanting has been known to soothe the fevered mind. A space of belonging goes a long way in healing wounds of belonging & identity. But the mental health discourse today rejects or deifies some practices, based completely on their political allegiance.
I engaged with a group of activists with degrees from a certain prestigious social sciences institution. Yoga is bullshit, I was told (and so is gymming). Self-diagnosed bipolar is real, they went on to inform me. As well as, you are an abuser because you are cis and not from an oppressed caste so what happened to you is not valid or real. What a fun bunch of people.
Members of this group work with a suicide helpline and have therapy practices. They pointed to an old generic tweet of mine, claiming that it was a targetted attack. My supposed victim? One of their ilk whom I had asked not to share stolen content on a Whatsapp group. In a matter of minutes, the hate-fire became an order for me to pass all my communications through them for approval. Otherwise we will cancel you.
What kind of professional sells their services along with a side order of a threat? A mercenary, that is who. How can the stability and balance required for good mental health be driven by an agenda for a vote and a wallet?
There was a wave of standup comics and other amateur performers who were advised by therapists like these, to try making people laugh as a cure for depression. Imagine putting an unstable person on a stage where they can get booed off. And now imagine the audience that paid to watch them meltdown, issue suicide threats disguised as poetry, valorise incel culture & lash out at specific members in the name of crowd engagement. This is why I stopped engaging with standup comedy. I am not qualified to be a therapist. My mental stability is not a privilege that I need to apologise for. I should not be paying with it because someone’s therapist thought I should.
Therapy in a culture of ‘Kehne mein kya harz hain?’

Therapy in India lacks accountability while also being stigmatised. The effort to de-stigmatise therapy seems to come at the cost of mental health – gaslighting, bullying, shaming. The space is skewed in favour of privilege & class, in a culture that demonises the different. What passes for professional mental health work, is knowledge of the jargon and a dictionary-waving attempt to fit people into the prescribed list of pathologies & conditions.
Thus, the flag for better mental health is being carried by the very people whose existence causes some of those issues – misogyny, queerphobia, casteism, colorism. And this is a culture that believes in ‘kehne mein kya harz hain’, a callous disdain for what is said, underlining a practice that purports to heal through talk.
I’ve experienced firsthand how damaging unregulated therapy in India can be. I found a certified therapist with glowing reviews and saw her for months. She had me do free-writing exercises and stop all television and reading (“because it is triggering”).
One time, I ran into my neighbors right outside her building who wanted to know what I was doing there. This is not intrusive in Indian culture; it’s friendly concern and is perfectly acceptable. Caught unawares, I didn’t have the language to explain to them and ended with a flimsy lie. The experience left me trembling.
When I made it to my appointment, the therapist scoffed at me for my reaction and aggressively demanded to know why I felt such shame in talking about being in therapy. I’d been hearing so much about how therapy wasn’t easy and that you were required to do self-work that I still tolerated this. I only quit when in session, while I was talking about experiencing severe violence, she said,
“I know people like your abuser who get very very angry <sympathetic face>. You just have to get over it because how long are you going to keep holding on?”
This experience was a brutal reminder of how unsafe and unregulated the mental health space is. I’m told this was ‘ just a bad therapist’. How is one to find a good therapist? By trial and error, it would seem. Very expensive, damagingly hurtful, soul-crushing trial and error. While a whole lot of strangers get paid to do this to you and get away with zero repercussions.
The Price of Therapy In India
After COVID, I struggled with mental health crashes that required professional help. Fortunately for me, I was able to get the right treatment through doctors whom I had had prior relationships with. How come with all the hooplah about mental health, we rarely hear about the need for gynacologists (if you’re a menstruator) and endocrinologists? Hormone imbalances wreak the kind of havoc on your entire being, physical and mental that no amount of talking is going to save. I’ll tell you why not. Blood tests don’t sound as cool as an all-knowing expert who will magic your pain away.
And it wasn’t about inaccessibility or expense either. A suburban hairstylist in Mumbai now charges more than a medical specialist at a reputed hospital for a single appointment. Even the therapists that these doctors were able to recommend also charged more than twice the doctors’ fees. This was never about whose work is more valuable; just about who can get away with charging that much and people will pay.
What is the logic of someone with a year’s diploma and zero accountability charging so much more than a doctor with years of education & experience, much more stringent checks and literal danger to life? It’s no more than a capitalist win – the Barbiefication of mental health care. Therapy, it seems, is a luxury only the privileged can afford—yet it remains riddled with issues and offers neither guarantee nor accountability.
Is Therapy The Right Solution For Indian Mental Health?
You can’t nurture the mind when you’re battling for a piece of it. These patterns of hostile gatekeeping repeat across Indian mental health care. There are no checks in place and no way to hold them accountable. The degrees from reputed institutes do nothing but solidify that privilege and shield their holders from consequences. There is systemic arrogance and militant aggression, demanding absolute agreement. Where is there room for even empathy, let alone humility in this?

I know mental health is a burgeoning problem. Whoever we are, wherever we are, we are grappling with realities never seen before. And there are so many more of us, which makes society & culture more painful friction than anything. ‘What’s the solution?’ I’m asked when I bring up these issues. Not therapy in its current state, I say.
My original post got too long so I divided it into two posts. If you found this post interesting (even if you did not agree), please consider reading the other post as well – Navigating Therapy & Mental Health Support in India.