Monesha L. and Sathyaraj Venkatesan examine how Indian digital comics frame mental health as a shared social condition, extending health humanities beyond the clinic and into the textures of everyday life.
The post-pandemic period has witnessed a marked surge in mental health narratives within India’s digital public sphere. Among the most actively circulated and accessible forms are web comics and visual narratives by independent artists, shared through social media and reaching audiences structurally neglected by formal systems of mental health care and representation. This article analyses how Indian digital comics by artists such as Shoili Kanungo, Akshara Ashok, and Ramya Sriram visually narrate everyday anxiety, ADHD, stress, and emotional exhaustion amid hierarchical and unequal health infrastructures in India. Situating these comics as part of India’s emerging digital mental health narratives, the article contends that these comics frame illness as a shared social condition rather than as an individual pathology. At the same time, the online platforms that host them expand access to mental health narratives and expose entrenched inequalities in care and representation.
At the Margins of Care
Data from the Indian Journal of Psychiatry show that nearly 15% of India’s population lives with some form of mental health condition; yet access to professional mental health care remains limited – only 0.75 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, well below the World Health Organization’s benchmark of 3 per 100,000 – leaving over 80% of those affected untreated. This structural deficit invites a reconsideration of how mental distress has been historically understood in the Indian context. In Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and its Healing Traditions, Sudhir Kakar observes that disturbances of the self were historically attributed not to familial dynamics but to karma. Karma refers to the ethical principle that (intentional) actions generate consequences that shape one’s present/future experiences, spanning multiple life cycles. Healing, in this framework, did not involve only the living but also supernatural beings. Put together, mental illness was conceptualised as cosmological, relational, and communal rather than individual. Kakar further argues that mental health issues were historically shared by priest and physician alike, until what he calls the inexorable march of scientific naturalism (over the last century) which confined clinical authority to a doctor alone. In India, mental distress has historically been understood through spiritual, cultural, and community-based frameworks, which modern psychiatry has gradually pushed to the margins (Kakar 1982, 10).
In India, the psychological burdens of caste discrimination, communal violence, patriarchal structures, and intergenerational trauma can not only obstruct access to treatment but also fundamentally determine who suffers, in what form, and why. A Book of Light: When a Loved One has a Different Mind, edited by Jerry Pinto, documents individuals living with mental health experiences in Indian families. These families function simultaneously as sites of care and harm, offering support in the absence of accessible professional services while also reproducing stigma and silence that deepens distress. Notably, Pinto’s contributors are largely middle-class, English-speaking individuals who seek priests or exorcists over a psychiatrist, reflecting India’s enduring preference for spiritual and supernatural explanations of mental distress over biogenetic ones. It is within this interstitial space that Indian digital comics have emerged as a significant cultural form. Shared on social media, they circulate across class, caste, and linguistic boundaries, reaching diverse audiences as they are self-produced and unconstrained by publishing barriers. Akshara Ashok’s mental health comic series Happy Fluff Comics, for instance, has garnered over 227,000 followers on Instagram. In this way, Indian digital comics enrich mental health representation and visibility by centring the experiences of women, queer people and caste marginalised communities, who remain largely absent from mainstream mental health narratives.
Digital Comics and Postcolonial Registers of Care
Indian digital comics differ from global mental health narratives by resisting the individualist and clinic-centred frameworks inherited from colonial psychiatry. Instead, they foreground culturally embedded registers of emotional and affective life, rooted in kinship, domesticity, and vernacular tradition. Ramya Sriram’s “Amma Says” series exemplifies this orientation. Drawing on the Tamil lexicon of maternal care and domestic rituals, Sriram situates mental well-being not as a clinical therapy but as shared meals, watering plants, or a friend checking-in.
In a personal email interview Sriram says, “These everyday frames make mental wellbeing feel more relatable and they reflect how self-care actually functions in most Indian households, through relationships and conversations and the joy that comes from knowing that you are not alone.” In this formulation, care is located less in the clinic than in the intimacies of home.
Akshara Ashok, a Chennai-based comic artist, approaches similar concerns through a distinct aesthetic and thematic lens. Her illustrations foreground the everyday lives of young Indian women, addressing colourism, matrimonial pressure, menstruation, body hair and social discomfort. By insisting that these experiences are not trivial, she resists the aesthetic polish and aspirational narratives that social media often demands of women. In Ashok’s words: “social media is filled with perfect stories, achievements, and aesthetics. I believe that there should also be people who talk about the opposite of that. Drawing about it helps me process my emotions and gives solace to the readers.” Her comics thus perform a critical cultural function: they challenge stigmas that are often side-lined within official public health discourse as well as within family and social spaces.
Potency of Digital Circulation
Deborah Lupton’s Digital Health: Critical and Cross Disciplinary Perspectives argues that digital and social media platforms do not merely circulate health content; they also reshape the conditions under which health is experienced and negotiated. While digital health technologies are frequently celebrated as solutions to problems of healthcare delivery and communication, less attention is paid to how these platforms operate as cultural spaces that reconfigure the terms of formal mental health discourse (Lupton 2018, 10). For Indian comic artists, this distinction is crucial. Print comics in India remain relatively expensive to produce and are geographically constrained, their circulation often limited to urban, English‑speaking, upper‑middle‑class audiences. Digital comics, by contrast, collapse these barriers. In this sense, digitality does not merely extend distribution; it enables new possibilities for mental health discourse, expanding both audience and participation.
Shoili Kanungo’s “Black Panther and Little Fish” makes this dynamic palpable and reveals how the form of a digital comic can register mental illness as lived experience. The page fragments the bathing figure into uneven, overlapping frames, denying a stable, unified body and visually echoing psychic dislocation. A restrained palette of black borders and flat blue water encloses an unembellished brown body, refusing spectacle. Water functions as both material setting and metaphor, at once cleansing and engulfing. Furthermore, the desire to glimpse a black panther through the watery curtain fuses desire, fear, and escape in a single image. Operating outside clinical vocabulary, the panel renders distress as intimate and culturally situated, exemplifying how Indian digital comics convey the inner experience of unwellness rather than how it is defined by diagnostic frameworks.
Indian digital comics constitute a significant yet underexamined site for mental health discourse within health humanities. They neither replace therapy nor claim clinical authority. While they do not prescribe, diagnose, or substitute for forms of care that remain structurally inaccessible to large sections of the Indian population, these comics nonetheless render mental health issues legible. By framing mental health distress as a shared social condition rather than an individual pathology, and by drawing on culturally embedded practices of care that exceed clinical definition, these graphic narratives extend the reach of mental health discourse in India. They also generate critical awareness of the cultural and material conditions that enable such narratives.
About the authors
Monesha L. is an independent researcher and alumna of the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli (India). Her research concentrates on comics, memory studies, postcolonial mental health narratives, trauma studies, digital humanities and historiography. Her published works and conference presentations engage questions of trauma, transnational memory, archival representation, and graphic storytelling. Her recent research article appears in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
Sathyaraj Venkatesan is a Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli (India). His research concentrates on graphic medicine, comic studies, and American literature. He is the author of eleven books and over a hundred research articles that span African American literature, health humanities, graphic medicine, film studies, and other literary and cultural studies disciplines. His recent co-authored books are Dementia and Graphic Medicine: Beyond the Living Death Narrative (New York/London: Routledge, 2026) with Laboni Das and Drawing the Pandemic: COVID-19 and Graphic Medicine (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, 2026) with Ishani Anwesha Joshi.
References
Kakkar, Sudhir. 1982. Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and its Healing Traditions. New York: Knopf.
Lupton, Deborah. 2018. Digital Health: Critical and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. 2025. “Advancing Mental Healthcare in India.” Press release, February 11, 2025.
