Calling Uncle Bakhshy

A loving father's remarkable journey from hapless parent to caregiver and advocate after his daughter's heartbreaking diagnosis

- Sukhada Tatke

Amrit Kumar Bakhshy's status on WhatsApp reads: "To know schizophrenia is n to know psychiatry." But in A 1991, when he received a call from his 18-year-old daughter Richa's boarding school in Dehradun, he knew neither of the two. The school authorities believed Richa was close to a nervous breakdown. She had been in the school infirmary for two nights where she was administered drugs by a psychiatrist. Bakhshy got on a flight immediately. By the time he arrived, his daughter seemed okay, if a little incoherent.

Richa stayed on for a few months to write her exams before returning home to Mumbai. But things soon worsened: she grew reactive and belligerent. One day, Richa began screaming, saying her classmate was harassing her, singing songs and making indecipherable sounds. This was the start of her auditory hallucinations. Later on, she would also begin to see things. The first psychiatrist they consulted misguided them by saying what had happened at school was probably a single, one-off episode. This did not compute with what the Dehradun psychiatrist had suspected—and what was later confirmed by another doctor: schizophrenia. The shocking revelation was the first step on a journey through the dizzying warren of mental health illness.

"Schizophrenia is a very complicated illness. It is a spectrum, the most difficult and worst of all mental disorders," says Bakshy. At the time of Richa's diagnosis, the now 81-year-old admits he knew little about psychological conditions. As a child he had seen people moving aimlessly on the road, some shabbily dressed, others talking, gesticulating to themselves, immersed in visions no one else saw. A similarly affected girl he would often hear screaming was administered electric shocks. He was “scared of such people".