Adapting Psychiatric Case History Taking Practices for Indigenous Transgender Communities

Abstract

While there is ample sociological or anthropological insight into the lives of Hijra persons in India, very little of it has been utilized in praxis for making mental health-care spaces Hijra-inclusive. Dominant discourses in Western psychiatry fail to tend to this community, predominantly because of its colonial gaze, inability to think beyond binaries, fancy to put “gender nonconformity” into diagnostic labels, and lack of intersectional focus and culture sensitivity. This is corroborated with remarkable service underutilization in this group as a parallel reality. Case history taking is an important part of any mental health intervention. In this article, the author shall attempt to delineate how psychiatric case history taking may be adapted to the needs of potential Hijra clients through ethnographic input from their lives. These provocations were initially shared by the author at the virtual Criposium Conference, 2020, organized jointly by King’s College London Disability+Intersectionality Reading Group and SOAS Crip Feminist Reading Group.