When the breakdown takes lives

Soon after the Second World War, America saw a spurt in its girls attending Catholic schools. Correspondingly, a decade later, a 1956 study found nuns getting hospitalised for mental illness at a very high rate. Sister M William Kelly, who collated data from 357 US mental hospitals that year, found depressive symptomatology “quite common” among sisters of the order. A nun herself, she concluded that a highly structured life led to “feelings of failure”, often manifesting as “breakdown”.

  Two oceans away and 62 years later, in 2018, there was news from Kerala about finding a middle-aged nun’s body from a well at a convent she lived in the Kollam district.

  Sister C E Susamma (54) had been a school teacher in the Pathanapuram town. She had committed suicide. Reason: chronic stress, as her medical records revealed. None knew of it. The bespectacled nun was loved by students at the St Stephen’s School where she was considered “an affectionate teacher though a strict disciplinarian”, to quote an alumnus.

Susamma’s was not a one-off case among Kerala nuns. Three years ago, Stella Maria (33), a young nun at Sacred Heart Convent,  killed herself in Vagamon in the hilly Idukki district. She, too, had jumped into a well. According to her colleagues, Stella was undergoing treatment for depression. The late nun, like Sister Susamma, was teaching in a school, and was always a silent soul. She was least keen to share her problems with even the inmates in the convent. When it seemed that she was getting extremely cloistered, she was taken for counselling two months before her end.

  The most prolonged of criminal cases of a nun’s unnatural death is that of Sister Abhaya. Born Beena Thomas, the 18-year-old Catholic sister was found dead on March 27, 1992, in the well of a convent in south-central Kerala’s Kottayam, her hometown. It took 16 years to conclude that it was a case of murder, disproving what the CBI had said in its first round of investigation: suicide owing to depression.

Medical anthropologist Claudia Lang notes the irony, “What many Christians diagnosed with depression do is to seek ‘spiritual counselling either from a priest or a nun.” For, they are “said to ‘get visions’ of a person’s problem in the wider context of their life....” she notes in Depression in Kerala: Ayurveda and Mental Healthcare in the 21st-century India. That way the sight of a week-long stir by half-a-dozen nuns themselves in front of the state’s apex court, seeking justice, was a particularly disturbing one for people at large — irrespective of religion. — ST