From Mental Illness to Disability

This article traces the critical engagement of the women's movement with psychiatry, mental health and disability in India over the past two decades. Three phases can be discerned in this history. The first was a phase of radical intellectual disbelief about the very existence of mental illness as a valid knowledge category. In the second phase the experiential reality of women, who had to engage with their own emotional states, found expression in a variety of discourses about women and mental health. The marginalisation of women by the mainstream medical sciences was addressed, and the right to care was redefined as the creation of gender-sensitive sciences. In the third and present phase I interrogate the paths we have taken in the creation of such gender-sensitive mental health practices. A mental illness language has been exhausted of any positive content. The rights orientation to mental health can be developed from disability thinking, which is providing an alternative vision for the world, as well for persons labelled mentally ill.