There comes a moment in
everyone’s life when life becomes a burden. Instead of accepting an inevitable
fact, we blame the person in distress for showing signs of “weakness”. The
suicide of a 34 year old bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput last week shocked
everyone in the Indian subcontinent. However, it showed very clearly that our normative
aspiration for having a successful career, becoming rich, earning fame and
adulation, simply cannot be a replacement for having good mental health.
As per the latest available
NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) data, in 2016, suicide was the leading
cause of death for Indians between the ages of 15-39. More than two hundred
thousand people committed suicides in India that year. Most of them were
students and unemployed individuals. Of course the number of Indians surviving
with mental illness is much higher. So either the society has chosen to turn a
blind eye or they have chosen to distort the reality by blaming the victim as
it feels more comfortable to do so. But numbers don’t lie, repeating a phrase
like “committing suicide is not a solution” is akin to ignoring the reality
which is that, it IS a solution for more than a hundred thousand Indians every
year. This reality needs to be acknowledged for any real change to happen.
In India, given the
diversity of its population, the problem of acknowledging the truth has its own
challenges. First we conflate the occurrence of suicides with various religious
beliefs. The rhetoric that stems from people’s religious beliefs is even more
confounding, we go to the extent of saying that a suicidal soul will not rest
in peace so one should not commit suicide. How convenient!
If we do not conflate this
mental health crisis with our religious beliefs, we conflate it with the
infamous motivational jargon - “stay positive”. What does this phrase even
mean? Saying “stay positive” to someone who is going through a phase of
depression is a way of gas lighting them. Pushing them back into their shell
and making them question their reality. Every time we say “stay positive” to
people who have opened up to us, we have been culpable in killing the spirit of
that person who chose to trust us with their reality. Instead of saying “stay
positive”, we could try to empathise with their reality. We could ask them to
go and speak to a psychologist if we sense depression or perhaps remain silent
and let them unload their thoughts. Why deny someone their reality?
According to an article
published in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry (2018)[1],
the number of mental health professionals in India is abysmally low. For every hundred
thousand population of our country there is .05 (in Madhya Pradesh) to 1.2 (in
Kerala) mental health professionals available for help. It is not humanly possible
for one mental health professional to care for a hundred thousand patients! So
giving fuel to these social media messages about shifting the burden of mental
illness on the friends and family members of those who are mentally ill is
again a way of denying that individual their right to accessible mental
healthcare. Instead of demanding for national policies on improving mental
healthcare by accepting that our country is going through a public health
crisis, especially during this period of social isolation, we have chosen to turn
to motivational speakers. If not motivational speakers, we turn to tantriks or faith
healers to deal with mental health problems. Unfortunately, the loss of a very
successful bollywood actor has forced us to address the unprecedented rise in suicides
in our country.
It is time we as a
society ask pertinent questions as to why have we not been able to train more
mental health professionals to deal with this rising public health crisis? Why
have we not focussed on asking for state subsidised mental health care
especially for students and those who are unemployed? Why have we not made provisions
for sabbatical for professionals for taking time to care for their mind? What
will it take for us as a society to make these real claims? More suicides?
I am not going to delve
into the other dynamics of our country’s population like gender, caste, class barrier
and so on, that further disadvantages people when it comes to access to mental
healthcare. It’s about time, we need to come together as a nation and encourage
people to seek professional help without inhibitions. We should pride ourselves
in caring for those with mental illness just like we care for people with physical
ailment. It may be an invisible wound but it is very real for those who are
going through it. It is the society that is weak as it is unable to handle the
reality of mental illness not the mentally ill.
On an individual level
we must look at how disconnected we have become in this age of connectivity and
social media. As a society we Indians have forgotten how to empathise with
varied realities and be kind to one another. We keep forwarding motivational
messages on social media but in turn we keep losing our emotional capability to
empathise with a person in distress. The actor’s suicide, the reaction from the
public and celebrities, if we look at it closely, we will see that the problem
does not lie with those who choose suicide as the solution; but the problem
lies with society we live in, with us, who conveniently deem such individuals
as weak. Let us stop being complicit to more suicides, let us take the conversation
on mental health forward.
[1] Singh, O. P. (2018). Closing treatment gap of mental
disorders in India: Opportunity in new competency-based Medical Council of
India curriculum. Indian journal of psychiatry, 60(4),
375.
Author is a
doctoral scholar. The author's research
interests include gender, power relations, popular culture, mental health and intimacy.
