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One morning in June 2020, Meenakshi Sajeesh, a shy and petite woman in her 20s with wavy black hair hanging past her waist, got into her father’s auto rickshaw. Her parents had insisted she accompany them on a trip, though they didn’t tell her where they were going. Two hours after departing the town of Angamaly, the family arrived at the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church Medical College in Kochi, in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Sajeesh felt her stomach drop. A few weeks earlier, she had told her parents she was a lesbian; now she realized they had brought her here in an attempt to “cure” her.
As Sajeesh stepped into the doctor’s office, she texted friends to let them know her whereabouts. She also pressed the “record” button on her phone—knowing she might one day need proof of what was about to transpire. “Then, I hid my phone, in case they locked me up or took me somewhere,” she recalls.
The doctor was a middle-aged woman named Santha Abraham who told her mother, “Let’s try to change her.” The visit lasted several hours, Abraham insisting that Sajeesh check into the hospital’s psychiatric ward for further treatment without divulging any more details about what treatment there would entail.
Sajeesh flatly refused. “I told them I didn’t want to change because there was nothing wrong with me in the first place.”
Either way, the doctor’s words had given her parents “false hope” and left her feeling traumatized. She told her parents then and there that she would never enter an institution like that again. Standing up for herself was a life-changing moment: “I don’t know if I would be alive today if I had agreed. I feel like I wouldn’t even have stepped out of that place,” she says. (Sajeesh requested that TIME use a pseudonym to protect her safety. Abraham declined request for comment on…
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Source : time
