Ranchi, July 2: City psychiatrists today admitted receiving a large number of requests for certificates of “insanity”. Most such requests apparently are made by either criminals trying to build an alibi or by men who want an easy way of divorcing their wives.
The doctors hastened to add that it was unethical and illegal to declare normal people as mentally ill. But they also conceded that psychiatrists do have the authority to issue certificates and there is no regulation or law to control the action of unscrupulous psychiatrists.
They reacted with shock and horror to the sting operation in Agra which caught on camera a psychiatrist accepting a sum of Rs 10,000 for certifying a woman as insane. S.K. Gupta, they felt, had brought the profession to disrepute and should be given exemplary punishment. Significantly, Gupta is a member of the UP health service and attached to the Agra mental hospital.
With Ranchi having not one but three mental hospitals, the state capital attracts mental patients from all over eastern India as well as Nepal. Hospitalisation being rather more difficult, and expensive, many of them prefer attending the outdoor department at the mental hospitals or consult private psychiatrists or those who have retired from government service. No system, the doctors agreed, has been evolved so far to regulate the issue of certificates of “insanity”. The doctors are neither expected to maintain a record of patients they have certified as “insane”, nor are they required to preserve copies of certificates or subject them to independent inspection or audit. It is, therefore, relatively easy to issue back-dated certificates, too, at least theoretically.
The head of the department of psychiatry at Rims, A.K. Prasad, however, felt that it was difficult to declare an otherwise sane person as “insane”. A complete psychological evaluation, he said, is necessary before branding anyone as mentally unsound. The psychiatrist must take down the entire “case history”, learn the background and early symptoms before keeping the patient under observation for two weeks or so. Only at the end of this period can the psychiatrist say with some conviction that the person is mentally imbalanced.
Prasad, however, admitted to a large number of people turning up at Rims, with or without the patient, for certificates of “insanity”. He vehemently denied, however, the possibility of false certificates getting issued even inadvertently. S.R.P. Shukla, a psychiatrist attached to Mecon, agreed that courts of law do give criminals the benefit of doubt if it is proved that they were mentally ill “even for two hours”. But then issuing certificates, he pointed out, was risky. because the doctor would be called upon to prove this in court. But then the doctor at Agra actually boasted that he would testify in court, if necessary, while issuing a false certificate to a journalist. S.K. Shastri, another city-based psychiatrist, recalled that a few years ago a man from Jamshedpur approached him for a certificate declaring his wife insane.
