Member-only story
Why Is It Women’s Duty to Cure the Incurable?
Harmful myths in South Asian marriage culture
My mother told me something last week that I have not been able to stop thinking about. My aunty is looking for a wife for her 38-year-old son. He has a serious mental health condition — my mother described it as “his mind works like an eight-year-old’s.” The plan was suggested by a peer, a local spiritual healer the family trusts more than any doctor. His advice: marriage will fix him.
I wish I could say this is a strange, one-off decision made by one confused family. It is not. It is a pattern with a name in the research literature, and it has been documented across India and Pakistan for years. Families believe marriage can cure or calm serious mental illness. Doctors know it cannot. And the person who ends up paying the price of ignorance is almost always the wife.
The belief has a name, and doctors have been pushing back on it for years
Researchers call it “marriage as a perceived panacea” for mental illness — the widespread idea, especially in North India, that finding someone a spouse will settle a psychiatric condition that medication and therapy have not.
A study out of India examining this belief found that mental health…
