MentalHealth- beyond sharing hashtags -6 THINGS WE CAN DO!
In the next 48 hours & perhaps for a week, every other brand,semi-celebrity will come out & talk about #sushantsinghrajput, #mentalhealth & the grave issue it poses to our society but then we will again forget till the next victim.
You will share posts about ‘reaching out’ , ‘ask for help’ , “I am with you,please speak” etc…but this cycle will then again repeat. If you want to do something, instead of sharing the typical posts which hardly cause an impact. Start by taking 6 actionable steps:
1. Educate yourself: for example being sad/depressed is not the same as clinical depression. (also please do not take a general doctor’s word as sacrosanct. I remember an incident where an endocrinologist at a popular Delhi hospital would tell patients to start watching Sadhguru’s videos as the only solution for ‘normal mental health issues’.They are doctors & other mental health practitioners who specialize in this field ,talk to them.
2. Empathize: You may not always understand the disease or the emotions of someone suffering, but empathy is something we are all capable of.
3. Use the right words: Somebody who is meticulous & a perfectionist may not have OCD.In fact, OCD till a few years back was considered among the top life-limiting physical or mental diseases in the world. But if you listen to it be used in some of the current popular culture,it comes across as this cool , idiosyncrasy illness one has.
“It’s not at all that’. These are serious diseases.Please don’t belittle people who suffer from them. Same goes for depression or schizophrenia or even when we say someone ‘committed suicide’
4.Support: There are few people who have spent time & effort to do something in the mental wellness space, & from my personal experience I can, unfortunately, tell you despite all the media hoopla around mental health it’s not easy to run something without a profit motive.
5. Question Brands: Brands will post around support of mental health & RIP. Ask the hospitals & insurance companies how many of them cover mental health? Some insurance companies will not even allow for coverage of physical health issues if a mental health condition wasn’t disclosed. Which means customers are penalized for having a mental health issue on the records.
6.Question Businesses: What’s your business’s mental health policy? And I can also completely understand if they don’t have a policy yet but have you ever had a session with your HR or business leaders on how to respond if your colleague suffers from clinical depression or perhaps worse OCD or Bipolar.
How serious is this -according to stats from WHO & other credible organizations..the number of Indians suffering from mental health issues could vary from 7.5% to 20% in 2020.
And finally my background to speak about this…I used to run a not for profit project called ‘Honest Conversations over Coffee’ which dealt with the issue of ‘mental wellbeing’ & ‘urban loneliness’ https://medium.com/@Blabberings/what-is-honest-conversations-a0125ee8bf47& any time or money put in to run this was my own, aided by a few friends like Megha Chawdhry.
We went to various corporates to support us with just a ‘venue & awareness’ not even donations.We didn’t find a single one, in fact, two of the prominent coworking spaces whose space we used on Sundays told us ‘we can’t host you since we don’t see this as a fit for our members’. Finally, I had to shift gears to a ‘for profit’ version which would dilute what we were trying to do but was the only option left.
We need to start taking ‘mental wellbeing’, ‘loneliness’ as serious issues.
We need a massive shift in attitude
