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ABSTRACT
The paper presents the case study of a mental health collective run by queer people in Mumbai that aims to promote mental health literacy and help-seeking behavior that are anchored in the psy disciplines although the founders are not psy professionals themselves. The study analyses the delicate balance between valorizing personal experience and trusting psy authority that is evident in the functioning of the collective and in the founders’ own negotiations of their psychiatric diagnoses with their queer identities and other experiences. The analysis is anchored in a broader pattern in India of privileging the psy disciplines over other medical systems although psy authority remains contested and diffused owing to several factors. The limitations of the informal nature of the collective and their acceptance of psy authority are also explored.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. this study does not deal with psychoanalysis.
2. this is not to say that biases alone constituted diagnostic categories. as rose (Citation1985) says, notions about the meaning of “population, statistics, evolution and heredity” as well as legal and econ9omic discourses and knowledge of mental pathologies all influenced the development of psychology (p. 7).
3. “borderline personality disorder is an illness marked by an ongoing pattern of varying moods, self-image, and behavior” (National Institute of Mental Health, 2020).
4. ‘add [is] a developmental disorder characterized by symptoms of inattention … or by symptoms of hyperactivity and impulsivity … (sheil, Citationn.d.).
5. this is not to delegitimize feminist critiques of bpd but to caution against applying them aprioristically to personal narratives.