What we didn't learn about depression from Deepika Padukone
"Everyone was coming to meet me. But, I didn't feel like meeting anyone. Occasionally, I'd ask to see my child, but they would keep my daughter away from me. They were scared I might potentially harm my newborn. The truth being I could not hurt anyone at that point…I didn't want to live. I constantly saw images of people coming to kill me. They would always wear red and carry kitchen knives. I was always scared. I didn't understand what was happening to me. A couple of times, I overheard my in-laws whispering the word 'pagol…' My husband, I think he was ashamed too. Despite the doctor telling him I was suffering from post partum depression. That it is quite common. 'Her father had it. Oder gushtipagol (their entire family is mad). My mother had warned me while getting married to her,' he'd once lashed out, when the doctor suggested I needed counseling and an increased dosage of medication. That this was not the usual "baby blues," that most women go through. Was my depression hereditary? Would I end up like Baba, dead? Hanging from a ceiling fan. Would my daughter have it too? Would they also call her "pagol?" Could she escape her own sadness..."
39-year-old Asha Sengupta (name changed on request), mother to one-year-old Pratyusha is battling her own inner darkness, and while the medication does help keep the hallucinations at bay and calm her frayed nerves, she has been separated from her child, and now resides most of the time with her widowed 85-year-old mother, in the shadowy bylanes of her North Kolkata home. The same address where her father, a teacher in a government school by profession had decided to end his own life. The room he was found dead in, locked, forever.
It's taken me three and a half decades to come to terms with my biological father's childhood manic depression, his subsequent schizophrenia, leading to his gory suicide. I don't remember my father at all, to be honest. I was barely two. But, for years, I have wondered why my maternal grand-parents, in whose home I was raised, never mentioned how we lost him. Whether it was a heart attack, or cancer, or something else. How a parent could become a star all of a sudden. The usual way of explaining death to a child - not realising how confusing it can all be to him. I have lied about my father in school, written imaginary letters to him throughout my childhood, been angry with him when I found out, a day before my tenth boards. From hatred to fear - I too have wondered several times, like Asha, if the occasional fleeting sadness I nurse, at times, resulting from professional failures to personal injuries, could ever really catapult into a darker truth. If the sadness, the stigma and the stain, must really be carried over, generation to generation? I think of my father, a lot. But, mostly, because somewhere I am still unable to forgive him.
Maybe, it's hard, to understand, to comprehend the depths of a disease as complex as depression. Harder when it affects our mothers, our sisters, our best friends, our bosses, our girlfriends, wives, spinster aunts or widowed sister-in-laws. When it isn't exactly glamorous. Or a condition we can easily talk about. Say, on the dining table, or in a family wedding. When the twilight extends beyond dopamine, fludac, counseling, institutionalisation… a punishing, all pervasive aloneness. Recently, a health report by the World Health Organisation placed women in India at high risk, even claiming depression to be a significant contributor to disease and even suicidal tendencies, saying that the burden of the disease is 50 per cent higher for women than men. The World Mental Health Report further added that depression is two to three times more common in women. According to WHO, Indians are amongst the world's most depressed. A study conducted by the organisation revealed that while around nine per cent of people in India reported having an extended period of depression within their lifetime, around 36 per cent suffered from what is called a major depressive episode (MDE). The average age of depression in India was 31.9 years. By 2020, depression is slated to be the second leading cause of world disability, and by 2030 expected to be the largest contributor to disease burden.
Leading mental health crusader, Ratnaboli Ray, founder, Anjali, Mental Health Rights Organisation, says, "Women's lives, be it in the urban or rural setting involves them facing multiple hazards and switching a variety of complex roles - raising children, managing the kitchen, wearing so many hats - mother, wife, daughter-in-law is both difficult and tiresome. Often, there is no space to express her sadness, with tears being the only form of protest. Immediately labeled as an illness. The truth is mental illness carries a greater disease burden than cardio vascular disease, malaria and tuberculosis, still, mental health is seen as disjunct from the overarching public health system - thus glaring issues of women's mental health continue to remain unaddressed…"
Ironically, Ray's own initiation into the field stems from a deeply personal journey, "Mental illness has had disturbing connotations for me right since my childhood. It was embodied in the physical presence of two aunts whom I never got to know. Both suffered from schizophrenia and they were locked away from public gaze. They were never a part of family gatherings. It was as though they were in a state of non-existence, in the never-never-land of the cuckoo's nest. It was impossible for me to forget my aunts. Their imagined voices resonated in my mind, stimulating me to pursue a degree in psychology and take up a career in caring for people with psychosocial disability."
"My husband made fun of me calling me 'pagal aurat'. He forced me to have sex even on days when I was at my lowest. Saying he will send me to a mental asylum, threatening electrical shocks. Punishing me for my sadness… I was always sad… my sadness had no language actually… it made me feel safe. I tried slitting my wrists, once. The son used to lock me in a room. Saying people would treat us like outcasts if they knew I was raving mad. My daughter's in-laws were told I have a dreaded disease. Maybe, I did. A cancer of the mind...maybe…" pauses Meenakshi Dixit, a 54-year-old house-wife in Mumbai, whose onset of menopause brought on a tide of manic depression, that she is still fighting.
Alone. Mostly.
"Avantika was admitted to Pavlov Mental Hospital, Kolkata by her own family. A young woman, a graduate in English literature, she belonged to a joint family in North Kolkata and had eloped against her family's wishes with a Muslim boy. He eventually exploited her and left her with no choice, but to return to her own home. Incidentally, her brother also demonstrated some signs of being mentally unstable. Her life, after her break-up naturally wasn't easy. Maybe her family wanted to punish her for marrying someone from another religion- maybe she did show symptoms. The truth being that mental illness is often used to punish people. Today, we have integrated her back. Her brother too is seeking treatment. Avantika is waiting for a job…" cites Ratnaboli.
Has it helped then that Bollywood A-lister Deepika Padukone also shared startling details of her own battle with anxiety and depression. With the disease clouded with celebrity deaths, is hers the inspiring story of human survival. Telling us depression can affect just about any woman. Rich. Good-looking. Famous. Successful. An icon with a strong identity. Or did she merely describe the superficial aspects of the disease, albeit glamorising it, but oversimplifying the gorier corners of the condition - in what some survivors like 37-year-old banker Sunanda Agarwal, allege was a banal PR exercise, related to the actress becoming the WHO spokesperson, the face of a campaign. That is still largely a battle within a war.
"I was a high-flying investment banker; my husband and in-laws were the most loving people. But a day and half after my son was delivered in one of the plushest private clinics, on a gloomy, rain-swept February morning, I remember I just couldn't stop crying. I saw my husband resting beside me, on a divan, and fearing the worst. What if he died? I was given immediate medical attention and my well-wishers thronged me. I was on Fludac for more than seven months. But it doesn't help. The demons always hide inside your mind. Luckily, I felt a lot of love for my child and that coupled with my family's support helped me gain my confidence back. I resumed work. But my maternity leave was a punishment. And yesterday, after dropping my son to Montessori, his first steps into the outside world, I confronted my old fears… what if we are all growing old too soon… if we die? I guess the inevitability of death has still not left me…" Sunanda pauses prophetically.
Her silence a sign, as if. Of the gaps we still need to fill. How the road is long. And we are only at the beginning of our journey…