Psychiatric Disability and Rhetorical Ethos in the Indian Bipolar Mood Memoir

People with psychiatric disabilities are often dismissed by both society and the medical system as unreliable. This undermines their ethos or character as a speaker of their own story and disables them rhetorically. This article examines two Indian memoirs—Swadesh Deepak’s I Have Not Seen Mandu: A Fractured Soul-Memoir (2003, translated 2021), and Shreevatsa Nevatia’s How to Travel Light: My Memories of Madness and Melancholia (2017)—to show how individuals with bipolar disorder challenge this perception by mobilizing what Pryal (“The Genre”) calls the “mood memoir” to position themselves as experts in experiential knowledge they possess because they are psychiatrically disabled. It analyses rhetorical strategies these memoirists use to establish their narrative credibility and critique institutional psychiatry, cultural biases, and legal measures that exacerbate their disability and, in doing so, make a compelling case for rethinking what it means to be bipolar in India.