My Life as a Psychiatrist

Ajita Chakraborty presents her memoirs and selected essays that throw light on psychiatry and the way she practised it. Born in 1926, she was a pioneering women psychiatrist in India. She took a stand against the mainstream that simply used the premises and methods of western psychiatry, insisting that an Indian school of psychiatry must develop to suit Indians who were certainly not to be seen as just a variant of westerners. Right from her childhood, the author knew she wanted to be a psychiatrist., At the age of twelve she read Bijoylal Chattopadhyays Moner Khela (The Mind's Games) where he analysed fictional characters, following Freudian methods, and she was riveted. She says she was propelled by the need to know herself; to 'pursue a career that explained things to me' She left for the UK to train in psychiatry as soon as she received her MBBS degree in 1950, returning to Calcutta in 1960 as the first fully trained female psychiatrist of the country. The memoirs discuss her difficulties in building up her career; there was resistance from the medical establishment despite her formidable qualifications. Her first appointment was at the prestigious Presidency General Hospital, at the adjoining Mental Observation Ward, in the absence of a department of psychiatry. She worked very hard in making it almost a full-scale department, creating records of patients and their treatments, providing a much needed database. This experience helped her in conducting the massive survey, covering ten millions, in Greater Calcutta, reminiscent of the Manhattan Project of the USA, with valuable information and analysis. Of special interest is her account of new developments in psychiatry in the West, the anti-psychiatric movement which was a revolt against mainstream psychiatry, led by brilliant practitioners like Dr R D Laing, whom she acknowledges as her guru. She also writes of the growing recognition of the primacy of culture in psychiatry.