The attitude towards mental health issues must change

“Why don’t you have a bath and go out and meet your friends? You will feel better. Or you could go for a brisk walk, exercise always helps.” The list of well-meaning suggestions is impressively long—join a yoga class, get a puppy, learn guitar, eat healthy food, go shopping, find a new boy/girlfriend—always ending with the classic ‘what have you got to be depressed about?’

Newsflash: you don’t need to have a solid reason like terminal cancer or losing your job or partner to be depressed, though these can certainly be contributory factors in several cases. This is something most people, especially those who have never been depressed or witnessed it at close quarters, just don’t get. If they did, perhaps they wouldn’t be so quick to judge who should or should not be depressed and exactly what level of trauma and suffering warrants the ‘self-indulgence’ of being wrapped up in your own personal misery.

Shockingly, that remains the general opinion of millions of people like us, especially in India, who haven’t quite got to the acceptance stage of visiting therapists and counsellors for mental health issues — that depression is something you need to ‘snap out of’ because it really doesn’t exist. It is only when the extreme step is taken —suicide —that the magnitude of the disorder is taken somewhat seriously, though this, too, comes with its own set of pejorative musings. After the recent suicide of 61-year-old celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, reactions such as, ‘Didn’t he have that Chinese noodles meal with President Obama?’ ‘Such a famous man, he had it all, why throw it away?’, were posted on social media. In August 2014, when American actor and comedian Robin Williams who ironically — and magnificently — played the Oscar-winning role of an empathetic psychologist in Good Will Hunting, committed suicide after battling severe depression — later reports listed a form of dementia as one of its causes — public reactions were similar: ‘How could such a well-loved comedian not love himself enough?’

The truth is that no one will ever know why a person is driven to cross that ultimate line or what threshold of pain is ‘acceptable’ to consider killing oneself to be an appropriate response; whether there is a final trigger that blurs the line between seeking help and thinking no help is ever going to be enough. The journey from the last, lingering hope to the point of no return is the most lonely one undertaken. To label it selfish, as actor Val Kilmer did in the case of Bourdain, or to suggest weakness or lack of willpower to shame people dealing with mental health issues, is being downright uncaring and ignorant. There are over 322 million depressed people in the world, as per World Health Organization estimates, marking an increase of 18 per cent from 2005 to-2015; 7.5 per cent Indians suffer from mental health problems that need intervention; 4.5 per cent or 56 million from depression, another 38 million from anxiety disorders; 300 people commit suicide in India every day. How do we as a country deal with this? India spends 0.6 of its total health care budget on mental illness with a grand total of 3,800 psychiatrists, 898 clinical psychologists and 2,350 psychiatric social workers and nurses to treat the mentally ill. WHO data estimates a figure of three psychiatrists per million people.

Not included here are those who find it difficult to get out of bed every morning, and who feel they are swimming in glue against the relentless tide of overwhelming anxiety and concentric circles of fear. Those who are terrorised by demons they find hard to articulate and share. What they are looking for — and rarely find — is for someone to stand in their shoes for a second and just acknowledge what they are going through. The understanding, the empathy, the options, the solutions of professional help and support, all come later.

Writer Eric Shapiro’s tribute/obit for Robin Williams is a remarkable precis for the unaware/uninformed: ‘Depression isn’t pessimism or viewing life darkly, depression is relentless and cruel, a maze without an exit door, a holocaust in sub-zero temperatures. It doesn’t care if you’re famous or rich or talented, it is a murderer. And the last thing we need to do is punish the afflicted.’

So the next time a person takes a ‘mental health day’, try not to tell him ‘there’s nothing wrong with you’ or ‘be positive’ or ‘stop your medication’. Don’t urge him to get up and get going. Sometimes, your aggression or attitude may just end up being the tipping point.

The writer is a journalist and a documentary filmmaker and has authored three non-fiction books