Pollution: The Case of India

Early in January 2020, while anxiously speaking to a colleague, I was thinking about how I have become dysfunctional. I obsessively read everything. My panic-stricken and recurring thoughts about the state of my country, my home, were haunting me like a waking nightmare. My colleague at the time responded and said, “That's how everyone is. Panic and dysfunction are not a pathology of the individual anymore. You are not alone.”

In that moment, I felt relief. The feeling of terror that haunts me pervasively occupies every home in India today. I am left speechless watching this terror expand its many wings over every city. I sit back in fear, not even able to join any protest, in paranoia that I can be attacked. But I am not crazy to feel shocked and afraid. Everyone is going through this!

I am a clinical psychologist working in New Delhi. Earlier this year, everything was florid and magnified here. Every day, my patients would share how the events in our country are impacting them. Every day, I would listen to their feelings of shock, helplessness, hopelessness, panic, anger, and sadness.

Last year, I attended a conference about mourning and loss and their relationship with mania, depression, and creativity. A senior psychoanalytic psychotherapist who was curious about my practice in India asked me if the pollution in New Delhi was unsettling. I told him it is quite troubling, and in fact, every year around Diwali, I develop a cough. He asked me if my patients talk about it. I told him some of them do and even more so around Diwali; this festival falls around the month of November, and this is also when the pollution levels rise in the city. It always comes up in the sessions.

“Do you bring the fact of pollution up with them?” he asked me. “You know, if people are talking about the pollution, are they really talking about the pollution, or are they talking about the pollution of their inner states, their minds?”

As he continued to speak, I began thinki