ABSTRACT
Every nation, just like its citizens, has a unique overall personality, nature, life style, values, brain and Mann. In order to work on a person, understanding his self, nature and needs is very important. Similarly, in the context of social work in India, while working on mental health, it’s vital to perceive the significance of the uniqueness of India’s Mann. Being a time honored civilization; India has successfully understood and recognized its needs. Like other aspects, psychiatry has been given high importance and has been developed efficiently in the past 5000 years.
The current western psychiatry is incapable of fulfilling the needs of the Indian psyche since the two are completely distinct culturally, socially and in their family values. Working in this field requires an understanding of these differences. According to the laws of counseling, if the counselor and client come from different cultural backgrounds, it is very likely to fail. Whereas we are talking about the whole mental science, we must realize the fact that even if we use current western psychiatry, the thousands of years old Indian mental science should not be ignored, not only because it’s very scientific but also because it is fully developed in all its aspects.
All of its theories have gone through a series of experiments and are time tested. Just like a non-scientific and illogical way of treatment must be denied, at the same time it’s very important to make sure that a science that has evolved over the last thousands of years is not left behind just because it is old or because it has come from a different cultural identity … something that has unfortunately happened with Indian psychiatry.
We Indians have a deep heritage and legacy of immense amounts of experimented study. It is the need of the hour to take it further.
Being a small part of Indian psychiatry, Yoga has made its mark in the world. This chapter focuses on how the Indian concepts of mental health can be incorporated in the contemporary psychiatry practices.
