Some parents see young love as mental sickness

9 Oct 2011 Anahita Mukherji MUMBAI: Falling in love outside one's community does not figure anywhere in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Yet, a growing number of parents are sending their children-both adults and adolescents-to psychiatrists in a bid to "cure" them of this "affliction". While the khap panchayats of north India are notorious for executing youngsters who fall in love outside their caste, some metropolitan parents can have their own style of being prejudiced. They don't kill their kids, only beat them up or treat them as if they were mentally ill. Psychiatrists themselves have come under fire from irate parents. When Dr Harish Shetty, president of the Counsellors' Association of India, helped a Muslim girl escape from parents who were preventing her from marrying a Hindu, the girl's mother threatened to kill Shetty. He had to file a police complaint to seek protection. "There are instances when parents have brutally beaten a girl for falling in love outside her community and have even threatened the boy's family with dire consequences if he didn't leave their daughter alone. After the violence, they seek psychiatric help to legitimize their actions," says Shetty. One of the worst instances he dealt with involved a girl from an upper-caste Brahmin household who was branded with iron rods and beaten by her uncles for falling in love outside the community. The parents of a young man working in the infotech industry in London once tried to persuade city psychiatrist Dr Dayal Mirchandani to fly with them to London and hypnotize their son into falling out of love with his foreign girlfriend and returning to India. Another father wanted his daughter locked up in a psychiatric ward for a few months in the hope that her lover would forget about her in that time. Both the girl and her boyfriend were Hindus, but from different parts of the country. Mirchandani recalls a couple who belonged to different religions and faced so much societal pressure that both of them converted to an altogether different religion, becoming Baha'is. Antagonism towards mixed marriages cuts across community lines, with Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and Christians dragging their 'errant' children to counsellors. The angst can be particularly high for Hindu-Muslim relationships. Psychiatrists have also been asked to counsel youngsters who have fallen for a person belonging to a different caste or community within the same religion, or for that matter another denomination of the religion. Psychiatrists say that highly educated parents, who neither physically nor mentally abuse their children, can try to bombard the young with 'logical' reasons for why they should not marry outside the community. They weave in a network of family, friends and neighbours to convince the child. They also want mental health professionals to be part of this network. However, instead of following the parents' instructions to talk youngsters out of their feelings, many psychiatrists say they instead give the children strength to deal with the crises their families have created. "In such situations, people would earlier turn to priests. Now, they are turning to psychiatrists. I look at this as an opportunity to help parents understand their children better," says Shetty. Psychiatrist Dr Anjali Chhabria recently counselled the mother of a girl who had, in the past, been in three relationships with boys from another religion. "The mother felt the religion which the boys belonged to was 'inferior'. She could not understand why her daughter was 'selling herself short' when there were so many boys to choose from within the community," says Chhabria, adding that parents often blame themselves for doing a bad job of bringing up their children. Mirchandani feels that, with increasing globalization, youngsters from different parts of the world get a chance to meet each other. "This weakens the hold that traditional ideologies can have on an individual. With parents unable to understand this, there is a growing disconnect between parents and children." He points to the case of a girl from a small town who married a boy from a different community. The two live in the big city, Mumbai. Every time the girl's parents visit her, the boy moves out of the house. Her parents do not know of his existence. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/10283711.cms