Earlier this week, having read a major Indian newspaper’s publication of an opinion piece on the increasing student suicide rates in the IITs brought to the fore one of my long-standing gripes with the Indian education system. The piece starts off with the Supreme Court’s intervention into the matter and segues into recommendations for urgently incorporating mental health literacy in Indian universities.
Ever since my second year at university, I’ve had a bone to pick with most psychology programs in India. While the writer in that piece addresses mental health literacy as a whole, where does queer mental health literacy for students fall into this paradigm? While there is also no confirmation or data on whether these students belong to queer and/or Dalit communities, introducing the basics of queering and anti-casteing mental healthcare should seem like a basic step in the right direction. Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), it doesn’t seem to be that way yet.
I attended a liberal arts university in Pune and had declared Psychology as my Minor in my first year (spoiler alert: I dropped the Minor in my second year). While I was a student of Literary and Cultural Studies, I was deeply invested in understanding QAT (queer affirmative therapy) and had also drafted a research proposal for a project in this field. With this mindset, I hoped for this Psychology Minor to come in handy.
I was proven wrong in my second year itself. Courses like Community Psychology and Abnormal Psychology did not dare to go beyond textbook definitions and cookie-cutter assignments that provided little scope for deeper engagement with the discipline. Besides learning about the different types of mood disorders and rote-learning symptoms until 2 a.m., these semester-long courses were of little value to my interest in queer psychology at large.
While various institutes offer certificate courses and open-access manuals for psychology aspirants who want to specialise in QAT, little regard is shown for this sub-field in university graduate-level programs. Major universities, both public and private, in India, offer intensive graduate programs in clinical and counselling psychology.
But there is a pressing need for curricula developers and professors to adopt an intersectional approach to their pedagogy. I can only imagine the positive impact an introductory module on queering mental healthcare can have on a closeted psychology student who has always wanted access to the right resources to understand their own mental health and offer services later on, thanks to an initiative like this. The same can be said for a psychology student who is driven to address and tend to the psychological needs of clients from lower castes. It is high time for universities to offer compulsory or optional modules on LGBTQ+ and anti-caste mental healthcare.
Courses in Queer Affirmative Therapy in India So Far
Currently, some institutes and mental health organisations provide short certificate courses in QAT and counselling practices. The Mariwala Health Institute offered a 6-day course on queer affirmative counselling practices in 2021 with a more narrowed focus on queer and trans mental health concerns, instead of specifics related to gender-affirming therapies (GAT) or medical transition services. This course has given the necessary tools and training to over 150 mental health practitioners in India. However, since the 2021 batch, the course doesn’t seem to have run again.
Saksham, a Field Action Project by TISS Mumbai, also has a free manual on gay-affirmative counselling practice available readily online. While the workbook is replete with case studies and the right approach to be taken while tending to such cases with sensitivity, it seems rather outdated, having been published in 2013. Its contents are also specific to those who identify as homosexual, not accounting for concerns among trans and non-binary people.
More recently, Socially Souled, India’s largest psychology community since 2021, is providing a self-paced certificate course on QAT with live classes conducted biweekly over 3-4 months. Priced at Rs. 4000, this course doesn’t require prior experience in the sub-field from its participants and is more practice-oriented with real-life casework and supervision. However, there is no feedback on the efficiency of the course yet because it is slated to begin next month.
As can be seen through these examples, education in QAT is still in a very nascent stage and has been ever since the pandemic and beyond. The undergraduate medical curriculum, updated in 2019, does not include queer-affirmative training, and although recommendations for postgraduate psychiatry training include a module on gender, it has not been implemented. Similarly, Indian medical and psychological textbooks often contain queerphobic material, and the curriculum lacks actual training in the healthcare needs of queer clients in the form of an affirmative approach.
Although certificate courses in QAT and GACP (gay-affirmative counselling practice) are beneficial for career advancement and are catered to people of more universal backgrounds (not limited to only psychology graduates), why pay additionally for them when universities could try integrating them into their clinical and/or counselling psychology programs? This will simultaneously help students and early-career practitioners cut down on additional expenses and introduce these topics on a primary level.
Integrating Queer Psychology in Indian Education: Possible Solutions
As a student who would benefit from such education provided on a more formal level, I believe the first step in working towards and ultimately achieving this goal is to introduce a compulsory or optional module on QAT practices with a focus on role plays and case studies. While major psychology programs have modules on child and adolescent psychology, whether they address specific queer mental health concerns is an enigma. Queer mental healthcare cannot be reduced to a bullet point or sentence in textbooks and lecture slides.
It is important to explain how unsupportive biological families, workplace harassment, bullying at a school level and poor health (among many factors) impact the emergence of mental health disorders in queer people and what affirmative practices can be adopted. In doing so, the focus must also not be solely on binary healthcare; people with different gender identities go through their fair share of mental health struggles, and those deserve to have a platform in classrooms.
In carrying out such revisions, efforts must also be put in to invite guest lecturers like queer-affirmative therapists themselves who can give their first-hand account of what it is like to address psychological concerns of queer clients. Similarly, Dalit psychologists must be invited to do the same, and when they share their experiences, an upper-caste Hindu professor shouldn’t interrupt their lecture (Yes, this has happened in one of my courses).
Any pedagogy today also cannot neglect the role of AI in its respective field. A module on QAT must also address how queer populations are turning to AI chatbots who can address their needs, either because they do not have immediate access to a therapist or the therapy itself is not financially viable.
Intersectionality is no longer for students of the Humanities to study. This isn’t just about ‘inclusiveness’ as a convenient umbrella term for a cishet upper-caste population. The sooner queer and Dalit mental health literacy is introduced and taken seriously in educational institutions (whether that be for psychology, social sciences, or finance students), the better.
