A few years back, writer Shaheen Bhatt revealed that she has been battling depression since the age of 12. In 2019, she unveiled her first book titled I’ve Never Been (Un)Happier, an account of her living with mental illness. The memoir, which grabbed the attention of many, saw her opening up on a depressive episode and included pages from her journals that she has been maintaining for more than twenty years. And recently, Shaheen was a part of a panel discussion with badminton player PV Sindhu, actor-writer-comedian Mallika Dua and psychologist-author Arjun Gupta, as they spoke about bridging gaps in mental health by making support accessible.
In an exclusive interaction with News18, Shaheen talks about life post opening up about dealing with depression and shares her thoughts on how this mental disorder is often considered to be a rich people’s ailment. Excerpts:
A conversation has begun on mental health today. Despite that, why do you think people even in tier one cities still hesitate seeking therapy?
It’s just shame. Culturally, all over the world, there’s a brutal sense of shame in feeling anything other than what is prescribed and thought to be okay. It’s a result of years, decades, centuries and millennia of conditioning. We’re taught to keep bad things to ourselves and only talk about good things, put on a brave front and be strong. These are things that eventually prove to be detrimental. There’s a deep-rooted, pervasive sense of shame that we’ve about feeling anything other than what is considered to be good and perfect. But perfection doesn’t exist. There’s not a single person on this planet irrespective of whether or not they’ve anxiety, depression or a mental illness, who doesn’t have a bad day. That’s just life, it’s a part of being human and we can’t escape that. The way around it is to just understand that this is a part of life and there’s no shame about how we’re feeling.
But don’t you think that extremely expensive therapy sessions are also a deterrent?
Absolutely! Access is a humungous problem. Yes, therapy is expensive but there’s also not enough therapists. There’s more than 1.3 billion of us in this country and we, collectively, deal with issues like poverty and social disempowerment of women. There are so many more issues that the whole of India deals with. The fact of the matter is that we don’t have enough mental health professionals graduating every single year to fill the gaps. Cost is a definitely an issue but there are a lot of organisations that are working towards bridging that gap by making it more accessible and free. There are a lot more options than we had, say five years ago.
How long do you think it will take for the shame to wane? How does the road ahead look for us?
It might take us a very long time. There’s seven billion of us on this planet. Not everyone is always going to be onboard or understand. It’s a battle that we’ve to just continue to fight. If you’re seeking a kind of universal understanding, you’re never going to get there because there’s too many of us. But we’ve moved a lot further. The weird silver lining of the pandemic is the fact that more people have dealt with their own mental health issues and therefore, understand them. There’s a lot more understanding of poor mental health and the struggle surrounding it. To get to a place of deeper understanding, we’ve to consistently work towards it every single day probably for the rest of our lives and that’s okay. It’s just something that we’ve to commit to doing. The same applies to me.
In your book, you had stated that neither did your pain come to you because of your lifestyle not can it be taken away by your lifestyle. But have you ever had people telling you that depression is a rich people’s problem?
I know where that comes from. I’m extremely privileged. I didn’t have to fight for basic survival in the way a lot of people in the world and especially in our country have to do. Despite my privilege, I’m someone who experiences low days. So imagine what happens to people who aren’t in positions of privilege and those who don’t have the kind of access or resources that I do! No matter where you’re in life, every single person has feelings. Everyone has a mental health irrespective of the walk of life they belong to. Depression isn’t something that’s just for the privileged. Everyone across the board can go through it.
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On those days when you’re at your lowest, who becomes the go-to person in your family?
Everyone. I’m very lucky to have a healthy and strong support system at home. But the thing with having low days is that no matter how much you know you should reach out, you just can’t do that. I speak about it very publicly and encourage it but on some very low days, even I can’t do it.
Go on…
That’s the thing with mental illness… it severs connections and makes you feel very isolated. It’s one of the things I should practice doing. I’ve to remind myself that if I don’t feel like practicing it, it means that I probably need to.
