Rethinking Mental Health Kunika (Host)

Rethinking Mental Health Kunika (Host) - Tanmoy Goswami was a business journalist for most parts of his life. Then two years ago, he began sharing his journey of dealing and living with mental illness on social media. Recently, he was appointed as the Sanity correspondent for a newly launched European publication called The Correspondent, where he will be writing exclusively on mental health. Ahead of the Mental Health Day, we reached out to Tanmoy to understand his own journey of dealing with and talking about mental illness and health, mainstream media's lack of sensitivity towards reporting on mental health, among other things. Hi. I am Kunika Balhotra, the communication officer for Suno India and I will be your host for this episode. Hi Tanmoy! Welcome to The Suno India Show! So can you start by telling us something about yourself? Tanmoy- My first formal diagnosis that I have mental illness was about 18 years ago when I was in college. As it happens often, you put things behind when life happens. In 2017, my symptoms started reappearing, and I was in a bad enough shape that I had to quit my job. I was in the middle of writing a book, and I had to leave that halfway. We were expecting a baby, and it was quite a circus at home. To complicate matters, my depression and anxiety became pretty severe. That's when I decided that I need to understand this condition that I am dealing with and bring my journalistic instincts into understanding everything I can about what I am fighting. So, I started writing, advocacy, and maintaining a public diary of my journey on Twitter and LinkedIn. Then, I started this new uncharted path with a European publication. I’m their only correspondent in India, and I have been writing exclusively on mental health. My life is absolutely unrecognisable to myself. I had very different ambitions 2 years ago, and different plans for myself. If I go back even further, I come from a very small town in the East of India. Then I went to Delhi to study. When I think of the kind of person I was all those years ago, when I was first diagnosed with an illness, it becomes more difficult for me to recognise myself. This entire transition to the world of mental health has been brought on purely out of a lack of choice. It's not something that I am doing because I always dreamt of being a mental health journalist. Nobody likes to write about things like depression and suicide for fun or to become famous. When I now introduce myself, I make it a point to tell people that who I am today is a product of lack of choice rather than a conscious career choice that I always had at the back of my mind. With no regrets, this is what I am today. Host- How did you deal with these depression and anxiety issues for such a long time? Can you tell us about your journey of how you dealt with it and why you had all this in the first place? Tanmoy- Let me tackle the second part of your question first. Why does one's mind become ill? There is no one answer to this. The medical approach is to say that there is something wrong with the chemicals in your brain. That's the conventional thing to say. Many mental illnesses are a product of two things. First is something that goes wrong with your body and your brain, and second is something that goes wrong with your external environment. How your biology interacts with that environment determines whether you can function or whether you become mentally ill. Depression and anxiety are not exceptions to this. When I first came to Delhi, it was a massive culture shock. Like I was saying, my family is from a very small town. I had not left home for 18 years of my life and then suddenly I was in this big city with completely alien people and alien culture. I think that brought out a lot of anxieties that were lying latent in me. Even though it has become common to talk about this today when compared to 2001/2002, there is still a lot of mystery, stigma and taboo. As you can imagine it, it was quite bleak back then. It was a miracle that my college had a therapist. One of my friends thought that my condition was becoming so bad that I have to go and see the therapist in college. I am very thankful to my friend for sending me to the therapist because he helped me understand what I was going through. I would have acute physical problems. I’d often go out of breath, panic for no reason, see things, and feel like somebody is constantly chasing me and trying to hurt me. Then I would have self-harming tendencies. You tend to brush them away as a sort of typical teenage angst. But when it makes you dysfunctional and when you have cycles of suffering every day for no apparent reason, then you start wondering whether there is something wrong with you. Something that others probably can't see but I feel because I have to go through this every day for no reason. Going to therapy in the first and second year of college dragged me out of that condition. I didn't even know what depression was back then. There was no internet to google and find out what it was. I was quite bewildered. After that, I tried everything for the next few years. I went on this really crazy journey to search for a cure. There would be good days, but my predominant register was always despondent and dejected. A constant feeling of physical hurt was there and I felt like the whole world's burden was on my shoulders. So I went on a wild hunt to find a cure. I have tried everything. I have tried evidence-based medicine (which is popularly known as allopathy in India), homoeopathy, reiki, past life regression, and even aromatherapy. I am not a particularly religious man, but somebody told me not to eat non-veg on Saturdays, and I started doing that 10 years ago. I still don't eat non-veg on Saturdays. How did I deal with it? At some point, I became a believer in what I now call 'the gospel of whatever works'. I don't judge anybody's recommendations. If somebody comes and tells me to do something to find relief, I give it a shot. I realise that something like this really doesn’t have a prescription manual that you can blindly trust. It is not like bronchitis or pneumonia or malaria, with a well-established medical regime to follow. Most psychiatrists and psychologists will tell you that the science of it is new, raw and evolving, and there are no certainties. Nobody knows whether a particular pill will work, and to what extent it will work. I go to a therapist regularly, I go twice a week and there are quite a few pills that I have to take every day. Parallelly, I keep looking for answers in books and in conversations with random people. Ultimately, the one thing that has really helped me is, opening my life up and connecting with a large community of people who are suffering from all sorts of issues, and sharing stories. That's what saved me all these years. That’s how I deal with it. Host- You are a journalist and you write a lot about it lately. What is your say on the current scenario on mental health in India among the normal people? How do you think it's being reported? Tanmoy- It's a very good question. It’s also one of the things that makes me really angry about the state of reporting on mental health.So I think the way in which mental health is covered in the media currently in India. It is absolutely shocking the level of apathy that ignorance that exists specially in mainstream media and have worked in mainstream media for many many years and I have observed this from up close the the apathy towards things like mental illness cause suicide is just something else. So often you will see suicide been converted into basically clickbait. So the person who has died, the person’s identity will be disclosed, pictures will be put up just to make piece little bit more sensational and get a few more clicks and one of the reasons for which it happens specially with suicide reporting cases in India is, actually there are two reasons one there is very simple WHO checklist that you need to follow if you are reporting on a suicide. Respect the dignity of the deceased not give away the personal details, don't disclose the method of suicide because that give ideas to other people who might be vulnerable. Just basically respect the deceased and respect the privacy of the family. These are not very difficult things to implement but unfortunately I don't think most of the people in India even care about this. Recently the press council has issued a set of recommendations I don't know whether that will have an impact I hope it does. And the other reason apart from ignorance the other reason is and this is a little more structural and historical for a long time suicide was a crime in India right it was only the promulgation of the new mental health care law that we have for the last two years that suicide has been decriminalised.

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