While counselling is considered an individual prerogative, there is a need for family therapy as well
If you thought that mass suicide and cultism were confined to renegades of civil society, the Burari family episode shows the gruesomeness of hideaway delusional behaviour in a connected world. This was an educated family that stayed together — one of them was even an IT employee — had no money problems and was preparing for a winter wedding. They were so normal in their externalities, enacting the expected rhythms of life, that never once did they betray their deep sense of vacuum, alienation and inability to come to terms with the loss of their patriarch, something that hypnotically consumed all of them into believing that transcendence of anything earthly would bring them closer to supreme happiness. Clearly, the first person to have been affected was the patriarch’s son, who must have been so distraught as to imagine his father talking to him, directing him to do things and seek solace in his imagined reality. He seemed to have convinced his wife first of his schizophrenic hallucinations as infallible truth and then was able to not only convert the rest of the family but keep it a valued secret behind closed doors.
Many would argue that at least one of the 11 other members would be rational enough to spot disturbing aberrations of sanity but the trouble with shared psychotic disorder is that it happens among people who live in close relationships, so close as to develop a beehive behaviour, mimicking the primary inducer, in this case the son. It is found in parent-offspring, sibling-sibling or spouse-partners. The French first detected this syndrome, calling it folie à deux, case histories of which have included such rare combinations as of a physician-patient and even a man-dog! Rarely do all family members share the same delusions but the Burari family is a classic representation of what is called folie à famille. This emotional contagion of influencing each other’s thoughts was further aggravated by superstitious rituals of spiritualism as opposed to spirituality which would have guided them to survival. And in India, some superstitions are so deep-rooted in the personal and secret space that they are difficult to unravel and are impervious to any rational intervention.
Also, unlike the support group therapy in the West, we are still in denial of grief counselling except using wise words on stoic acceptance and moving on, implying an internalisation of emotions as a burden to be carried than exhaled. While counselling is considered an individual prerogative, there is, at least in the Indian context, a need for family therapy as well. And community agencies should be the first disseminator of comfort, engaging with the family through the crucial adjustment phases and noticing signs of insecurity and incompleteness. The West has a social structure based on nuclear existence but our kin, no matter what the inter-personal relationships or ageist persecution, still share a territorial and internecine contiguity of a single home. looking healthy is one thing but psychological assistance in these toxic times must also factor in understanding the surroundings of the afflicted. We need a mental health rehabilitation network at the community level too.