At 98, India's first woman psychiatrist crosses the digital divide

The grateful father of a recovered patient once handed Dr Sarada Menon an invitation for his daughter's wedding and said: “Please do not come.”

- Sharmila.Ganesan

Menon’s presence, he feared, would bring questions. Questions that would out a closely-guarded family secret: that his daughter had been seeing a psychiatrist. In newly-Independent India when people called her patients many names from “paagal” to “paithiyam”, Menon obliged many such reluctant invitations with her absence. “The stigma around mental health hasn’t fully gone but it’s much less,” says 98-year-old Menon, who has just finished another video consultation from her Chennai home. “Patients come and take us to their marriages now.”

Many things have changed since 1959 when Menon became India’s first woman psychiatrist as she began working at what is now called the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) in Chennai. There are more trained nurses, more women doctors, more awareness and more drugs other than chlorpromazine—which with its subduing effects on patients, had become the go-to prescription for schizophrenia patients in the 1950s.