A street psychiatrist and clinician anthropologist in London, UK, Dr Jadhav works as a Professor of Cultural Psychiatry, University College London; Consultant Psychiatrist, Camden Homeless-ed Outreach Services & Islington Mental Health Services & Lead Clinician, Cultural Consultation Service, Camden and Islington NHS Trust, London, UK. Dr Jadhav’s current interests include cultural and mental health dimensions of marginalised groups with a focus on South Asia. Calling the ‘Other’ impure and subhuman is a form of psychological ethnocide. This is a radical intervention with oppressed & oppressing individuals/groups distressed by their ascribed or self-proclaimed social identity, which lead to gradual psychological annihilation. Therapy techniques deployed active listening, reframing narratives of life experience, critically examining interpretive metaphors, and unpacking cultural dynamics of everyday oppression. Although subjects did not suffer from any formal psychiatric disorder, they expressed substantial social psychological distress at the outset. A regular six-month follow-up over four-year follow-up with 10 subjects demonstrated both Dalit and ‘uppered’ caste subjects could be helped to overcome social defeat and guilt through a political therapy designed to strengthen skills to cope with humiliating, oppressive and discriminatory experiences. Improved academic confidence and performance, positive regard for personal identity, reduced suicidal ideation, better interpersonal skills and enhanced wellbeing were reported over the course of the intervention. This success has far-reaching potential to address social defeat among other marginalised social identities, for example, the ‘Homeless-ed’ people who experience, internalise, and are unable to cope with cultural defeat. Reversing the ‘Gaze’ of the oppressor and the innocent bystander is a challenge.
Falling Walls
Falling Walls Science Summit 2023
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How can you address social defeat in the Clinic
A street psychiatrist and clinician anthropologist in London, UK, Dr Sushrut Jadhav works as a Professor of Cultural Psychiatry, University College London; Consultant Psychiatrist, Camden Homeless-ed Outreach Services & Islington Mental Health Services and Lead Clinician, Cultural Consultation Service, Camden and Islington NHS Trust, London. He is the Founding Editor & Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Anthropology and Medicine. Dr Jadhav’s current interests include cultural and mental health dimensions of marginalised groups with a focus on South Asia. He has pioneered a political psychological therapeutic intervention for caste identity distress, premised on liberation psychologies.
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