Ishan Shivanand argues psychiatry over-medicates sadness without solving it. Real healing comes from families sitting together in silence, eye contact, and meditation daily. This spiritual practice, rooted in traditional Indian teaching, lets parents and children see each other as full humans instead of roles.
We must enable the science of the self in human beings, because today, even if you look at psychiatry, we know the problem but we don't know the solution. We know that the man has anxiety, and we have so many standardized tests that a man will come and say, you are sad, let me take a few tests. And we will take 3 hours of tests, and after that we will say, you are sad. But the man will say, I already knew I was sad. But we will say, no, now you are clinically sad. We are giving you a stamp paper for your sorrow. And now the man will ask, okay, what to do? And even the psychiatrist will start to think, no idea. Here, have a medicine, numb yourself. Have an opiate or have something that will numb your neurology so you will be sad but you won't feel it. That is not the answer. The real answer is the real education. And the real education is when the parent and the child, they sit, they meditate together. And a very basic thing that you can try as a psychiatrist is that when you have a family, just tell the family to sit together. Sit together, open their eyes, not talk, look at each other. Because we don't do that today. If I ask any child, how much time do you spend with your family? We may be in our house for 5 hours, but we don't communicate with each other. We are on our phones. We are more happy WhatsApping people rather than having an actual conversation. Because we find emojis have the power to send our emotions, to convey it better than we can. Because I have seen boys sending LOLs with a straight face, laughing out loud, laughing out louder, because we can't smile here, so we need an emoji. Now imagine How many more places will we need emojis to cry out loud or be laughing on the floor? Yes, this is happy. As a psychiatrist or as a human being, you know, you can try this. Sit together with your family and just look at each other and breathe. Deep breathing. Just, just do this and for 5 minutes looking at your family with a normal expression. And just looking at each other will bring such a phenomenal change, because then we will stop objectifying our family as a relation, but we will start acknowledging him as a human being. We have objectified our mother, that she is the lady who cooks, cleans, and give us food. And we have objectified our father— he is the one who buys iPhone. We have objectified our sister— she is the one we don't care about. They are human beings, they have feelings, and we need to see that. And if we spend time and really— and if really you want to understand life Then life starts from spiritual education. And that is what I suggest. If you have a family trouble, turmoil, or if there is descent in the generation that is coming, it is because we are not creating a good family system. In India, the good system was that parents achieve grace, enlightenment, realization, And then they pass that wisdom to the son or the daughter, and then it continues like a software recreating a new software. And we need to bring that automatization that existed, and that can only happen if this generation chooses that we, we will stand up. We will not be the weak link in the human history. We will not be the generation which leads the world to apocalypse. We will not be the fools who destroy the planet, but we will be the hope that changes humanity.
