The Jurisprudence of Suspicion

I have been institutionalized. I have been medicated against my will. I have been declared a “risk”. And every time it happens, I am reminded that mental illness is not only a medical condition. It is a legal identity. It is something the system interprets as a threat first, illness second.

Which means: mental illness in India is not treated; it is managed. Through paperwork. Through panels. Through medical-legal terminology that determines when a person stops being a person and becomes a liability.

The Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, was supposed to be a safeguard. It promised dignity. It explicitly says that individuals with mental illness have capacity unless proven otherwise. It guaranteed advance directives. It gave teeth to the idea of consent in treatment. This Act told the world that India had modernized its mental health jurisprudence. On paper, yes.

In practice, we live in a culture that is still terrified of the untidy, unpredictable, mentally ill citizen.

And that is what this piece is about: the jurisprudence of suspicion. Because suspicion is silent. It is not written in judgments. It does not appear in the Act. You only see it in how institutions behave with someone who is severely depressed, suicidal, or manic.

The system is always already preparing for possible future harm.

Mental illness is not evaluated neutrally. It is processed like a risk analysis.

For example, when a woman attempts suicide, the common response from the hospital is not: What drove you to this point? It is: how do we ensure you do not repeat this? The mental health system in India is obsessed with preventing recurrence. Not healing origin. And because recurrence prevention is the priority, the first instinct is control. Surveillance. Sectioning. Involuntary admission.

Our courts reflect that same logic.

Look at how courts discuss mental illness even in criminal law contexts. They treat it like something that degrades capacity, collapses reliability, and creates potential future deviance. Very rarely do they talk about agency under illness. Very rarely do judgments acknowledge that people with severe mental illness can still think, still reason, still consent meaningfully.

The law frames mental illness as vulnerability. But vulnerability becomes the reason to take away autonomy.

I know this personally. When I was hospitalized involuntarily, everything about me was presumed suspect. My memory. My sincerity. My own testimony about what I was feeling. Every time I spoke, the response was not: What is she saying? It was: Is this symptomatic? My speech wasn’t evaluated as an argument. It was evaluated as an indicator.

This is the silent violence of mental health law. The Act promises autonomy. The system enacts correction.

Let’s be clear about something: the 2017 Act is good in theory. It is far better than the 1987 Act. It centres rights. It frames treatment as consent-based. It recognizes Advance Directives. India got praise globally because it looked progressive.

But the Act lives inside a society that is still structurally terrified of loss of control.

Families invoke psychiatry to contain the mentally ill. Police invoke psychiatry to neutralize the disturbance. Psychiatrists invoke psychiatry to impose order. We cannot fix this through law alone if the cultural instinct is always suspicion.

The real legal revolution will begin only when we democratize the idea of capacity. When a mentally ill person is allowed to narrate their condition without being treated as an unreliable narrator. When a bipolar woman tells the truth is not dismissed as unstable, but taken seriously as a witness to her own body.

The jurisprudence must treat mental illness as a difference, not a danger.

We also need to start talking publicly about psychiatric power. How much authority do psychiatrists actually hold? How easily they can override patient agency. We discuss police accountability. We discuss state violence. But we do not discuss medical violence enough. And medical violence is subtle. You do not feel it as brutality. You feel it as being slowly erased from your own life decisions.

I have signed consent forms for treatments I did not want. I have had medication doses adjusted without real discussion. I have been placed under observation in rooms with locked windows.

It is easy to call this “care.” It is harder to call it what it also is: control.

This is why I keep writing about mental illness not only as an experience but as a legal category. Because if we do not theorize it, the state will keep doing what it does quietly: treat mentally ill people as a potential threat to be defused.

But here is the hopeful part. The 2017 Act genuinely gives tools to resist this. Advance directives are radical. Nominated representatives are radical. Capacity assessment standards are radical.

The problem is not the text. The problem is implementation.

And implementation will shift only when jurisprudence shifts. When the courts stop defaulting to paternalism. When the psychiatric establishment is challenged on its monopoly of truth. When families stop assuming that control equals care.

The future of mental health justice in India will not be shaped by more medication. It will be shaped by how we interpret consent, agency, and capacity under conditions of crisis.

The mentally ill person deserves to be treated not as a ticking bomb, but as a citizen with a complicated nervous system. Someone capable of meaning. Someone who can speak about their own pain without being invalidated for it.

We need to stop pathologizing the mentally ill for wanting control over their own body. Autonomy is not the absence of illness. Autonomy is the right to decide, even while ill.

If our law cannot protect that, then what exactly is it protecting?

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