When he's insane, she has a panic attack & mom has OCD...

“... So please don’t tell me
how you got a panic attack
when you saw the
prices at a branded store.
You did not get a panic attack
 you get pangs of stupidity. ...”

These words, part of Aishwarya Kamat’s slam poetry Please Don’t Tell Me You’re Sick, had the audience pause at an event on sexuality and disability in suburban Mumbai earlier this month. Far too many of us are guilty of casually bandying around the words panic attack, depression, insane, bipolar, OCD — all severely debilitating mental conditions that throw off-track hundreds of lives — to describe routine, everyday emotions and situations.

Kamat, who has had several diagnoses, including mood and anxiety disorders, says she feels “invalidated” when she hears these words in casual conversations. “When these terms are used casually, it trivialises mental illness and stops it from being acknowledged as a severe health issue. It is insensitive towards people who are constantly struggling with mental illness,” she says.

For another 21-year-old (who requested not to be named), experiencing cyclical depression, the mainstream acceptance of mental illnesses has turned out to be a prickly affair. It is because mental health conversations have become easier to conduct that it’s also “normal to use these words” in casual conversations, she says. “It was extremely frustrating in the beginning when I was trying to figure out my depression because the word is thrown around so much, yet its usage wasn’t doing justice to what I was feeling,” she says. “I’ve noticed that when I’m not in the middle of a depressive episode, I can’t really relate to other people who are depressed. So I understand when people don’t fully grasp what depression does to me, but that is never an excuse to trivialise it.”

Seeking attention with words

Clinical psychologist and trauma expert Dr Seema Hingorany says dropping mental illness terms in daily conversations is a trend. Talking about the case of a 12-year-old child, who came to her for “OCD because he put back his colour pencils in a very precise manner in his box”, she attributes this colloquial usage to the increasing reliance on “doctor google” and to the “know-it-all” personality type who likes to show off his/her knowledge. “While the stigma is gradually going away, mental illness itself is not taken seriously,” says Dr Hingorany. “I politely tell them not to mix up a severe mental disorder with their half-baked google research.”

While the 21-year-old science graduate feels people do this “to be taken more seriously”, Vijay Nullawala, who overcame bipolar disorder, and wrote the book A bipolar’s journey: from torment to fulfilment, ascribes this to people’s need to be dramatic, especially on social media. “It’s not that everyone is an attention seeker, but instead of saying they are upset, they’ll say they are in rage,” says Nullawala. “This leads to trivialising.”

Suffering in silence

While mental illness sufferers realise that the term-dropping statements are not meant to offend or are otherwise ill-intentioned, they are, nevertheless, weary about the consequences. “Often when trying to explain (my condition) to people close to me, they always end up comparing it to a point in their life when they were low and how they powered through. It is rare for someone to not equate sadness with depression,” says the person wishing anonymity. “Maybe people need to understand that just because you’re not depressed, doesn’t mean the sadness you feel isn’t valid or worthy of attention.”

Nullawala points out that the triviliasing can work to the detriment of a sufferer. “When uttered casually, it somehow implies that someone who is indeed bipolar or depressed, is so because of his/her own accord and willfully so,” he says. “This is the worst kind of stigma.”

Need for awareness

Kamat advocates increased awareness about mental health issues so that stigma is erradicated. Nullawala, too, says this behaviour stems from ignorance, as such people cannot be chided about their loose usage of words. “Mental illness cannot be seen, so it is difficult to articulate and for others to understand. The same people who use mental illness terms loosely will use the words cancer or heart disease casually too,” he notes.
As Kamat too said in the same poem:

“... Mental illness is
not a cool adjective
to fulfil your dramatic bullshit.
How dare you pretend
when so many of us suffer from it.
Would you tell me to shake it off, if I had a broken limb instead? ...”