New Delhi: “Darkness was her only companion at that time.” 

Talking about mental health, Ashok Taliyan, a resident from Gurgaon explains her daughter’s situation when she suffered from-acute depression and anxiety. He said she couldn’t sleep and just remain confined to her room.“At the initial stage, we didn’t realize that there was a problem but after we consulted a psychiatrist, we understood the issue, decided to address it and did not feel ashamed about our daughter’s illness and nobody should be,” says Taliyan.

Any sign of deviating from the expected and usual, emotionally and behaviorally, is viewed with a sense of horror. For Indians, Mental Illness is still a taboo and we prefer not to talk about it. But one will be appalled to know that at least 60 million Indians suffer from mental disorders.

There’s a reason we don’t talk about mental health because we don’t like to talk about ourselves, our inner fears and desires.Modern Indian society, with its propensity for drunken conversations, superficial humour, smart repartee, a sense of irony and detachment, prizes perfection, emotional numbness, and looks down upon vulnerability. So even though you’re with people, you’re alone—and despite having a good time, you don’t feel safe, and feel like left out as something is missing.

While, Bollywood actor Deepika Padukone a few months back, breaks the silence and stigma around depression by sharing, her battle against the ailment for the first time in media, it is heartening and refreshing that a mainstream film like Dear Zindagi, starring Shahrukh Khan and Alia Bhatt, chooses to talk about mental health, and does so in a manner that doesn’t trivialise its finer details.

The movie has a very real way of showing messy, uncomfortable feelings that you’ve surely experienced at one point in your life or another.Refreshingly, it argues that just every other physical ailment like fever, your mind needs a tune up from time to time and there is no shame in asking for help. And just like that, it rises above the white noise. It becomes radical and revolutionary.

Also, it is revealing to compare the portrayal of a woman’s internal distress in Dear Zindagi with that in a film from an earlier time. Khamoshi (1969) features Waheeda Rehman as Nurse Radha, a character maddened by the grief of being forgotten by her lover. In the movie, the modern, urban, family-less Radha’s emotional isolation is intense enough to result in her being committed to an asylum.

In Dear Zindagi, Kaira’s tale is no romantic tragedy, and she does not suffer the same fate. The film shows her sexual needs being met in a way that Radha’s could not have been in that film’s more conservative era. 

On the other hand, the film ‘Taare Zameen Par’portrayed a sensitive ordeal of a dyslexic child, Ishaan Awasthi, whose abnormal behaviour is misunderstood and mistaken to be something else both by his teachers and parents. Unaware of dyslexia, they think that he is lazy, stupid, naughty and even arrogant on occasions. But the movie is rightly able to draw the attention of everyone in the right direction that, kids like Ishaan should be given proper attention, understanding, and support by the people around them. Complimenting and encouraging them with their strengths and capabilities can really be of great help.

On the contrary, historically, Hindi films have only acknowledged psychiatric disorders with symptoms that can be dramatically demonstrated, as in the case of schizophrenia—delusions, dyslexia, hallucinations and so on.

Most of the emotional and mental disorders that appear in Hindi film are never well defined and are left unlabelled. There are films such as Ittefaq (1969), Khilona (1970), Anhonee (1973), RedRose (1980), Dilwale(1994) and TereNaam (2003), in which the mentally ill protagonists are anti-heroes. In Ittefaq, the main character is declared insane by a court after he violently assaults his wife. In Khilona, the lead character molests his caregiver in a manic fit. In both Dilwale and Tere Naam, the protagonists physically threaten and intimidate the objects of their desire.

Even when there are cack-handed attempts at providing a sympathetic view of the actual diseases—as in Shabd (2005) and Karthik Calling Karthik (2010)—the characters’ behaviour is always injurious and abusive. Even, many Psychiatrists believed that films being films, they are far from the truth, especially when it comes to portraying mental illness of a protagonist. They feel that scriptwriters and producers usually use psychiatric illnesses as condiments to cook a spicy movie, not actually bothering to go into the finer points of Psychiatry.

Concerned over the growing problem of mental health in India, the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had appointed National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in 2014. Mental disorders can be divided into two broad groups that are Severe Mental Disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and Common Mental Disorders such as depression and anxiety.

According to the survey findings, at least 13.7 per cent of India’s general population has various common and severe mental disorders and from them, 10.6 per cent of them require immediate interventions.

But due to the stigma associated with mental disorders, nearly 80 per cent of those with mental disorders had not received any treatment despite having severe mental disorders, the study says. The situation is even worse in rural areas where disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorders are often believed to be cases of possession by evil spirits.

The country with so big population has only 0.301 psychiatrists per 100,000 people.Dr. Neetu, Counsellor and Psychologist based in Ghaziabad says, “Poor access to medical care is partly to be blamed for this. Problem is, the focus is too much on medication and not on therapy but mental health is something that does not fully depend on the medication. It requires a different approach; combating mental illness requires therapy and Psychotherapists to help people to get back into their lives and deal with their problems.”

She further added, “In the case of mental disorders, it is true that fear of embarrassment causes more than 50% of cases to go unreported because people easily accept physical health issues but not the issues related to their mental health.”

References:
www.firstpost.com, 
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov,
www.caravanmagazine.in,
www.thebetterindia.com, and 
www.thequint.com.