The death by suicide of Nithin Raj, a dental student in Kerala due to caste discrimination and harassment by faculty members at Kannur Dental College has rocked public conscience yet again. Since then, many students have revealed serious instances of violence and violations by faculty members including body shaming, name calling, mocking parents’ occupation etc. It is worth noting that the relatives of the deceased student described it as ‘staff ragging’, which is unlike the popular understanding of ragging which involves only students. Pertinently, as faculty members are involved, students hesitated to lodge complaints fearing retaliation till one of their friends lost his life.
Even the Faculty are Not Safe
Some of the complaints which were filed by students against the faculty members were not redressed, according to reports. Such deliberate procedural delays act like a pressure cooker for the suffering person. This is not just a gap in implementation but an example of structural violence in India’s educational governance. Structural violence refers to the different ways powerful institutions hinder people’s access to basic necessities, trample on their rights, and create more marginalization than before.
Nithin Raj’s story isn’t unique. It mirrors the everyday reality of higher educational institutions in India.
Formal complaints against violence perpetrated by powerful groups are nipped in the bud leading to escalation of distress in the victim and reinforcement of power in the perpetrator, infusing toxicity, and lack of accountability and trust in the system. These are major social determinants of mental health that are often eclipsed in popular mental health discourses.
Most often, complex intersectional dynamics (re)produce microaggressions and (moral) violence on college campuses and many of them lack a public language. “You can do well in research and teaching because you don’t have a ‘family’ unlike me”, a male faculty colleague was told by a female faculty colleague just after two weeks of joining. “You have only one institutional responsibility to take care of, I have two children” was the response to the refusal to take up a department responsibility as suggested by the female faculty colleague in the official meeting. Being in the charmed circle of sexual and social hierarchy as a heterosexually married cisgendered woman with biological children, she gains extraordinary power to institute everyday violence on those whom she perceives as single/queer; lower in the social and sexual hierarchy.
At the same time, being a woman in a patriarchal society, her position is both understandable and reasonable given that women are primarily responsible for childcare and even senior caregiving in a household. As Foucault stated, we are all implicated in power, just on different terms. When systems are so unjust, instead of creating comradery, they further create rift even between differently oppressed classes. On a campus, this can lead to instances of both micro and overt aggression among faculty who should otherwise be standing together and working towards common goals. A senior administrator at a technical institution pointed out the worthlessness of a faculty because he doesn’t have a lab. He said, “You don’t have a lab, you don’t own a big lab [like other STEM people do]”.
These dehumanising remarks coupled with silence from other colleagues causes deep psycho-emotional harm affecting quality of work, mental health and life itself —-quite disabling for the victims. Mental health vulnerabilities are produced, reproduced, and reinforced by institutional norms that align with majoritarian sociocultural standards.
Institutional Misdirection and Mismanagement
If faculty members could be put under such pressure, imagine what students would go through when they are bullied by faculty members on the basis of their identity, disciplinary affiliation or social location. To sustain well-being and to prevent suicides, it is important to acknowledge suffering and act according to existing legal and constitutional guidelines. The Supreme Court has noted that institutions don’t even report incidents of unnatural death or suicide to police to save their prestige and that most of the committees to protect marginalised sections remain on paper.
Thus, the elephants in the room are normalisation of violence and violation of procedures established by law. For example, the Supreme court had warned IITs and IIMs recently for not cooperating with the suicide survey initiated by the National Task Force on Suicides and Mental Health. In January 2026, on the basis of the interim report submitted by the National Task Force, Supreme Court mandated fast reporting of any suicide or unnatural death to the police considering past lapses by even elite institutes.
The complaints are often pocket-vetoed and dismissed by accusing the survivor-complainant for being “mentally weak”, being “too sensitive” and unable to “adjust” with an unjust system. Sara Ahmad, social critic and academic poignantly writes in her book Complaint! That:
“A complaint teaches about institutional direction because a complaint is often treated as misdirection by the institution… to locate a problem is to become the location of a problem.”
Dismissing complaints stems from lack of compassion, empathy, and an ethic of care, and, most importantly, due to a callous disregard towards procedures established by law, all of which escalate mental health problems.
Silence and Violence of Mental Health Practitioners
One of the deepest concerns is the silence of campus psychologists who remain silent spectators of institutional apathy and violence thus aligning with the institution to cover up inaction, negligence, and violence to uphold institutional prestige. One of the ethical duties of any clinician is to make the invisible visible by exposing biased policies, structural violence, omissions and commissions at institutions that are detrimental to mental health.
Psychologists should not hide their heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich, but must record as accurately as possible facts as they exist to necessitate social justice.
Research suggests that bullying has to move away from dyadic perspective to a triadic perspective which focuses on the bystanders/ witnesses/ regulatory policies other than the bully-victim dyad. Bystanders consist of everyone who witnesses the act including the institutional authorities.
It is high time institutions are strictly monitored for any violation of existing statutory regulations and constitutional provisions. Being equally cognizant of microaggressions and moral violence is the need of the hour to keep a check on systemic violence that aims to destroy bodies and minds of individuals and particular communities. The unhealthy obsession of institutions with prestige breeds denial which is consequential as it ruins personal and public health. Most importantly, it fails to heal the trauma and restore the dignity and equal worth of human beings.
Sudarshan R. Kottai
Sudarshan R Kottai serves as an Assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad and is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi. Trained as a clinical psychologist, his research is broadly focused on 'modernsing ' mental health systems in the Global South and their relationship with the wider social world. He grapples with questions of philosophical interest in mental health care like why mainstream mental health academia/research/ practice primarily engages in “mirroring” the world rather than in “world-making”.