Renowned Psychiatrist and Founder of Parivartan – The Turning Point, Dr Rajendra Barve, recently interacted with Spectralhues.This exclusive interview was taken during the Interdisciplina
Dr Barve, welcome to Spectralhues. You are widely known among masses for your marvellous sessions, columns and books. Doctor, what is it that drove you towards psychiatry?
What drove me to psychiatry are people. I was trained to become a physician but I gave it up because I thought I am dealing all the time with machines, reports, graphs, x-rays and ECG’s. Now these things are supporting factors.But I wanted to deal with people, be with people, and psychiatry offered this best opportunity to me to interactface-to-face with people.
You are a specialist in Stress Management, Child Psychology and Past-Life Regression. So can you tell us a bit about all the three specializations of yours?
Child Psychology is all about making a very, very clear diagnosis about what is really wrong with the child or with the parents, or with the kind of academic environment in which the child is studying and learning. So this diagnosis is a real challenge in Child Psychiatry.
Stress Management is essentially about working on inside of how people create stress for themselves, and how to get them out of their denial mode.
Past Life Regression is a really big challenge, you know. It requires tremendous amount of patience from my side as well as from the patient.
Dr Rajendra Barve during Enriching Minds event
Which all psychological disorders are prominent among most of the people, and what are their causes?
That’s a big question. We believe that 7.5% to 10% psychological disorders are pretty serious. Remaining are situational – adjustment disorders, personality disorders and etc. And mostly what we see in young students is that their focus is very poor; they are carried away by all those, you know, very superficial activities – like going and meeting friends, and they don’t really know what they’ve got to do ahead.
Sir, can you tell us something about Parivartan – The Turning Point, and how it came about?
Parivartan – The Turning Point came about while I was working at many places. I finally zeroed down on my own place and said that this where I’ll lead to Parivartan (transformation). I wanted to transform people but transforming did not sound good, so I labelled it as The Turning Point. At Turning Point, I always tell my patients that at the turning point you need to slow down, look out- right, left, ahead, behind you. Check your fuel, metre, temperature. So slow down, take a breath, understand yourself and then proceed ahead.
What is the vision and mission of Parivartan – The Turning Point?
At Parivartan, we believe that everyone wants to grow and develop themselves, and in this growth process there are several barriers. Mental disorder is one barrier which we want to remove so that people go on from Manovikar to Manovikas.
You’ve authored 18 worth reading books on mental health, quality of life, tough mind and decisions. Can you tell us and our readers something about your books?
Tough Mind has been written couple of years back when we spoke about recession and people were not really finding time to do their own things and were feeling very bad about it. So I wanted people to get tough minded; that was the idea. Decision is again about taking a very decisive action in life; making a choice from your heart and head.
Dr Barve interacting with Spectralhues’ Suyash Karangutkar
Doctor, there still exist those who feel shy or disgusting or wrong in consulting a psychiatrist. Would you like to suggest something to these souls?
Ok. What I can say is that it is a decision not to visit; and it’s a decision to visit. Every decision has its consequence. If you don’t take the right decision at the right time, you may be slowly isolating yourself, feeling lonely, get away from the crowd or do something wrong and spoil your life.
Lastly doctor, what would be that valuable message of yours, for people at-large, that you would like to convey through our medium?
Ok. What I would like to convey is completely be in touch yourself, and understand yourself. You should know what is happening to you. If you don’t understand or recognize yourself then who will? Listen and connect to yourself. If you talk to yourself, there is a lot of wisdom and tacit knowledge within you, which will come out. Instead of spending a lot of time on useless things, utilize it for connecting with yourself; that’s very important.
Dr Barve, thank you for interacting with us. It was indeed a pleasure interacting with you! I am sure not only our readers but also others who come across this interview are going to incur major benefits out of this. Thank you so much!
(Photograph credits: Umang Sampat and Nehal Wadkar)
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