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We are all mad here!

Source: https://www.behance.net/gallery/35154617/JokerMad-Hatter-Design

Today, 10th of Oct is "World Mental Health Day" and even google bhaiyya does not want to make a doodle for it. 

The struggle is real!

So I wrote on facebook the other day about mental health and I got all sorts of comments. And I wondered why I inflicted this upon myself. You know how people put a caption beneath their pictures- “Felt cute, may delete later.” I should put a disclaimer with all of my opinions “Felt right, may change later.”

Approximately 0.1% of Indians have cancer—I verified this information from 2-3 different surveys (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5826535/). On the other hand, 6% of Indians suffer from mental illnesses. And yet, we know so much more about cancer than mental illnesses.

I don’t blame us Indians for it. I blame only one Indian who came up with this concept that if someone has mental illness matlab he is yeda, gandu, charyo, pottan, dabba, bonkers! I wish I could find that person and do charan sparsh! But I guess this concept of “mental illness= person gone bonkers” is a thing of the past. Thanks to celebrities like Deepika Padukone, mental health in India has a new dimension- now mental problems simply mean “depression”. We are so funny, no? For us, mental illness is either Sridevi from Sadma or Shahrukh from Devdaas! It is like saying - if you have a scratch on your leg, tu langda (lame);  if you have fractured your leg, tu langda; if your legs hurt because you have arthritis, tu langda; if you have muscle pain, tu langda! Every ailment related to one organ is not the same. Every person from north-east can’t be “chinky”! Every person from south is not "madrasi". Every ailment related to your brain can’t be either madness or depression!

I will list as many mental illnesses and disorders as I know. There is psychosis, anxiety (there are again different forms of anxiety), depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociative identity disorder. The list is longer than this. Some of them are more common than we know. Some of us live our lives without knowing that we are suffering from these. We spend our lives singing hrithik roshan's "main aisa kyun hu". Some of us, like singham, take pride in saying "ata majhi satakli". But boss, why do want to bear the pain when you dont have to! Imagine if we could get help and become 10 times happier, 10 times calmer, what a life it would be! Right now life's background music must be arijit singh's song for some and metallica music for some! But once you get help, aai shapat (mother promise), every single day when you wake up, "la la la la la" will start playing in the background! Wouldn't that be cool? 

PS: 
In my next article on mental health, I will talk more about getting help.
Till then , you can read Neel Burton's book "Meaning of Madness" to understand different types of mental illnesses.
If that is too much for you, simply google "movie characters with mental illness". It is a lot of fun!

Comments

  1. Rajiv30 October 2019 at 03:22

    Hi Shivani, appreciate your writing. can you please upload your next article.

    ReplyDelete

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