It was so refreshing to see the other day that popular Indian movie star Deepika Padukone talking openly about her battle with clinical depression and how with the help and support of the loved ones, not to mention some medicines and effective counseling helped her in her recovery.  Now only the horribly cynical would say that it was a publicity stunt.  I mean people would think what’s she got to be depressed about?  She has got everything going for her.  Her movies are always blockbuster, she has fans eating out of her hand.  That’s precisely the point I wish to make.

  According to the World Health Organization, India holds the dubious distinction of having the most number of depressed people in the world.  As if that isn’t damning enough, it also registers the highest number of suicides especially among the 18-25 age group in the world.  People often confuse being sad to being depressed.  They are not the same thing.  If you are sad, there is tangible reason for it.  Something you can put your finger on.  But depression is a kind of elephant in the room, and we are blind men who have tactile awareness of it, but can’t make out what it is.  Arundhati Roy described memorably this sense of depression in her seminal novel THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, where she likened it to an ice cold spider landing on your heart and would not go away. 

  I consider myself a bit of a manic depressive; I mean, the cold spider is not there all the time, there would be periods of intense energy, enthusiasm even optimism, followed by a period of dejection, depression and the futility of everything.  My mind would be consumed by all kinds of morbid thoughts.  I would start thinking is it any better for those who are long dead and gone?  Or do we, the living have some kind of an obligation to go on living, to those who are no longer among us?  You see, I am aware of the nature of the beast, so I know how to deal with it.  But for those who are chronically and clinically depressed, the situation is indeed very depressing (no pun intended).

I am no expert, but those who are, maintain that any chronic depression with clinical symptoms can be overcome by a good mix that involves counseling and some medication.  But here in India, there is so much stigma attached to any form of mental illness, that it becomes a festering sore in the family.  A malaise that dare not speak thy name.  When I see so much rage among the ordinary people, both inside their homes and out on the streets, I see in them the rage of a child but this rage is fertilized with an adult imagination, and it doesn’t know its direction.  In India, to accept any kind of mental issue is to admit failure in life.  It is like somehow you have let people down around you and that’s not an option for you.  On another somewhat lighter note, many renowned experts think that those parts of our brain which produce depressing emotions, are also responsible for some of the most creative impulses in human beings.  Some of the most celebrated works of art, literature and music produced by men like Picasso, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky or Virginia Woolf and also Beethoven and Mozart, they thought themselves to be at their creative best when going through a mental turmoil. 

But we ordinary people don’t belong to that category, and I hardly have any answers much less the remedy.  My job is to keep asking questions, and I suspect not enough people are doing even that.