IN THE VALLEY OF DESPAIR, 90 PER
CENT OF PEOPLE LIVE WITH MENTAL SCARS

by Justine Hardy
http://epaper.mailtoday.in/Details.aspx?boxid=1214993&id=38465&issuedate=2762010

THIS is an experiment in stepping away from all that is intractable in this discussion: from 1947 to 1989, the election fixing, cross- border  training camp sponsorship, corruption, separatism, geopolitics and human rights, the past and the future. This is about bringing the current situation home, to all of our homes, our streets, our families.

Imagine leaving your home, perhaps as you did today. Beside you is your husband or wife, or your son, or daughter, your mother or father, brother or sister — it could be anyone, but someone who you cannot imagine life without.

As you step out to cross the street, in the same place as you always do, there is brutal blaring and screeching, a rush of pressured air, a body lurching beside you. In the silence that follows you realise you are still alive, and that, though they have fallen, the ones beside you are also still alive, but you are not sure if they were hit or not.

If you were to be analytical now you would notice the rush of adrenalin, your chest- thudding heart rate, the playing out in your mind of a stream of imagined worst scenarios: possible injuries, pain, disability, even death. And then how, as the adrenalin drops away, this is followed by a sensation of being totally drained, wrung out.

Now imagine this happening every day — day in and day out, sometimes several times a day, sometimes many times a day, and at night too. Try and imagine how it might be if life were a series of moments of this kind of terror, combined with the expectation of violence, and that this threat of danger was not coming from a speeding, screeching lorry breaking the speed and safety limit on your street, leaving you in a haze of adrenalin, watching Blow Horn rushing away from you, but that your street had become entirely different.

In your street there are now regular crackdowns, crossfire, people beating down your door in the middle of the night, constant sleep deprivation caused by the anxiety of keeping your family safe and together, stone- throwing breaking out randomly, and other daily acts of violence that come out of a society living in fear.

Then ask the question of how you think you would be doing if this was your life on your street.

The mind simply cannot survive a constant barrage of this kind, and so it fragments, either little by little, or in one big collapse, with psychosis and total mental breakdown.

When this is the on- going situation across months, years, decades, perhaps for all of your life, what kind of mindset do you think you might have? Whe