During my early training in psychology, there was a quiet discomfort I couldn’t name. I would sit in case discussions, listen to diagnoses being listed, treatment plans outlined, and feel something essential was missing.
I remember a 17 year old girl I encountered during one of my internships. She had been diagnosed with body dysmorphia and wore a mask to hide her face. She believed her lips were deformed, and her shame ran so deep that she could hardly bring herself to speak. And yet, in the case discussion, all of this quietly disappeared. Her suffering was swiftly absorbed into a clinical language of cognitive distortions and body image disturbance.
Little attention was paid to what it meant to be one in a world saturated with narrow, often unattainable beauty ideals, where femininity is policed, faces are filtered, and worth is tethered to appearance.
Her mask was not simply a symptom, but a response to a culture that had taught her to see her own body as a problem. But in the clinical space, these social conditions were rarely named. Her distress was decontextualized, rendered private, and pathologized.
The broader systems that shape how young girls learn to hate themselves, vanished from the picture. Media, gendered expectations and consumer culture remained outside the frame. No one said the word “political”, and yet it was everywhere, in the mirror she could no longer bear to face, in the silence that met her suffering, and in the room itself, like a ghost we’d all been trained to ignore.
Over time, I’ve begun to see this not as an oversight, but as something baked into the frameworks many of us are trained to use.
There is a quiet violence in how human suffering gets stripped of its context, and how pain is reinterpreted through a lens that privileges the personal over the political.
How Psychology Unwittingly Participates
Mainstream psychology has developed a remarkable capacity to individualize distress. A young woman presenting with persistent anxiety is asked about her thoughts and self-perceptions but not about the neighbourhood she grew up in or the religious identity that shapes her everyday vulnerability.
A man exhibiting “anger issues” is advised emotional regulation but there’s no mention of the exploitative labor conditions he endures as a daily-wage worker.
These omissions aren’t necessarily due to malice. They are the consequence of a framework that was never built to hold structural violence. We’re taught to recognize “disorders” in the self, but not to trace them back to the systems that produce them. This is what Thomas Szasz critiqued in The Myth of Mental Illness – not that people don’t suffer, but that their suffering is routinely reinterpreted in ways that obscures its actual roots. When we treat the social asirrelevant to the psychological, we end up locating pain solely within the individual.
When Naming Becomes Erasure
There’s a peculiar dissonance I’ve noticed in South Asian mental health discourse: the way we use Western diagnostic language to explain deeply contextual suffering. What does it mean to label a survivor of caste-based abuse as having “low self-esteem”? Or to diagnose a queer teenager in a conservative household with depression, while ignoring the erasure of their identity? These frameworks don’t just fall short – they actively erase.
This erasure is not neutral. When therapy or psychiatric care refuses to name caste, class, gendered violence, or communal trauma, it becomes complicit in maintaining the structures that produce that pain.
This silence isn’t benign; it protects the status quo. And for those at the margins, it adds a second layer of suffering: being misrecognized, misunderstood, or rendered invisible within the very systems meant to provide care.
Western Frameworks, South Asian Realities
Much of South Asian psychology is built on imported theories. Concepts like “autonomy,” “self-actualization,” or “individual pathology” presuppose a particular kind of subject – often middle-class, nuclear-familied, urban, and Western. But life in South Asia is messier, more collective, more entangled. The self here is porous. Family, caste, religion, neighbourhood, and economic class are not background variables, they are constitutive of identity.
Yet, our clinical approaches often resist this complexity.
In supervision rooms and therapy sessions, I’ve watched how easily we ignore the chaos of social life to focus on measurable symptoms and neat interventions. A young boy’s aggression is framed as oppositional defiance, without exploring how classroom casteism and family debt might be playing out in his behavior. A woman’s panic attacks are labelled somatization, but no one speaks about the intergenerational silence around domestic violence in her home.
Distorting the Emotional Into Clinical
There’s a long history of turning emotional responses into clinical problems. Anger, grief, exhaustion, even political disillusionment – these are all legitimate reactions to injustice. But when someone voices these feelings in a clinical space, they are often seen as pathological. The woman who’s angry about her exploitation is urged to find inner peace. The man overwhelmed by joblessness is advised cognitive reframing. The student enraged by Islamophobic policies is told to breathe deeply.
Of course, therapeutic tools can be helpful. But when they are used to blunt political insight or suppress anger that is entirely justified, they can begin to feel like instruments of Compliance.
Therapy becomes a site not of resistance, but of adaptation to injustice. And that is dangerous.
Neutrality Is Not Neutral
One of the ideas I’ve struggled with most is the myth of therapeutic neutrality. As psychologists, we’re taught to remain objective, non-political, and non-directive.
But in deeply unequal societies, neutrality often aligns with power.
To not name caste is to side with caste privilege. To not mention religious violence is to validate the majoritarian narrative. To ignore poverty is to speak from a position that has likely never experienced it. Real neutrality would mean equal sensitivity to all experiences, but that’s impossible if we don’t first recognize that the field itself is already skewed.
Therapy rooms are not free-floating spaces. They carry the weight of their context. And when that context is built on inequality, “neutrality” often ends up reinforcing harm.
Toward a Repoliticized Practice
What would it mean to repoliticize psychology? Not to turn every therapy session into a political rally – but to hold suffering in its full, messy complexity. To understand that someone’s anxiety might be about safety, not cognition. That someone’s grief might be about generations of erasure, not just a personal loss.
It would mean creating spaces where pain is not flattened into pathology. Where someone can say, “I feel broken,” and instead of rushing to fix them, we ask, “What broke you and who benefits from your silence?”
A Personal Reflection
There have been moments in my own training where I’ve slipped. Where I’ve nodded at labels that didn’t sit right. Where I offered tools instead of solidarity. Where I focused on inner change when outer change was what was needed. These moments stay with me – not as shame, but as reminders of how easily we can forget to ask: What is this person’s pain asking us to see? Because when we ask that question, everything begins to shift.
Final Thoughts
To depoliticize human suffering is to rob it of its meaning. It is to isolate people from the worlds that shaped them, and then ask them to heal in isolation. But if we can begin to name what is present – caste, poverty, displacement, erasure, something opens up.
People no longer feel like they are the problem. They begin to see that their pain is not weakness, but testimony. And perhaps then, healing becomes not just possible, but profoundly political.
Neil Nallan Chakravartula
Neil Nallan Chakravartula is an aspiring social and critical psychologist, currently pursuing his Master’s in Psychology at the University of Mumbai. He holds a BSc in Psychology from Christ University, Bangalore. With experience in clinical, community, and research settings, Neil is interested in the tangled intersections of mental health, society, and power. He enjoys asking difficult questions - especially the kind that make people in the clinical world just a little uncomfortable.