Creator of Living Stories Sanchana Krishnan writes about her journey to honesty about mental health.

*     *    *

The Tamil word for ‘dawn’ (“vidii”, with an emphasis on the ‘d’)  is suspiciously similar to the Tamil word for ‘explode’ (“vedii”). Between the ages of two and four, I spent the better part of too many nights waiting restlessly for the explosion of dawn to bring the world back to me. Hours were spent jamming my curly head annoyingly close to my parents’ sleeping bodies, checking for breath. For some inexplicable reason, I was absolutely terrified that my parents would just stop breathing if I didn’t keep a close watch on them every night. The nights I did pass out, I was jerked awake unceremoniously every so often. My first desperate response was to making sure my parents were alive. On some nights the insects that sprouted in my head were now all over my bed, my hands and legs, sending me screaming and crying toparents who had only just managed to discover what sleep felt like.

On some nights, it would be past midnight but my dad wouldn’t be home yet and my mum had to hold down the fort on her own. As I grew up, the insects never stopped visiting, but I found different ways to cope. I now spent whole hours hiding in the bathroom with a book, preferring the loss of sleep to the loss of sanity. This should have been an early indicator of mental instability, but my behaviour won me the label of ‘troublesome child’ instead. No one expects their kid to be mentally ill. Parents are still hardly exposed to as knowledge about mental illness as they are of physical ailments.

Throughout my years at school, my mother kept her heart and our home open for the constantly revolving cast of friends that I made. This generosity also meant that she had to keep her ears and arms open for the sob stories and tears that would eventually follow. I was (and still am) a painfully honest human…with the energy of ten of me… hopped up on  a high dose of sugar. There is a lesson I learnt early on about honesty – nobody wants it. Your classmates don’t want you to tell them that they’re little attention-seeking pieces of shit, your relatives don’t want you to tell them that you’d rather be a writer than an engineer, and your parents don’t want you to tell them that you are lashing out  because of insomnia, more than insubordination.

Mental health is simply a term for the fact that one has to take care of the aspects of the brain that regulate emotion, responses, behaviour and feeling. Tumours and aneurysms in the brain can cause drastic changes in behaviour and personality. Neurotransmitter imbalances and size distortions of the glands are among a few causes that can result in mental illnesses. The brain is not an easy organ to study; what’s especially tricky is that a living brain is needed to attempt a complete understanding, which raises a whole host of ethical issues. All of this has resulted in a huge population across the world displaying behaviours that are deemed “unconventional” and “abnormal”, but whose causes at the same time are deemed nonexistent.

The neurosciences are a rapidly advancing field. There is plenty of knowledge to go around on how every single region of the brain has a specific emotional function as well. Brain wave activity tells a lot about the kind of personalities people have or grow to develop. Neurotransmitters control responses to stimuli, thereby determining how we as humans feel about, and emotionally (and physically) behave in situations. It’s really mostly a lot of chemistry and biology governing psychology. However, it works both ways; distortions in brain chemistry causes mental illnesses, and things like anxiety and depression affect neurotransmitters levels and brain wave patterns when they are actively affecting an individual. That’s what makes some mental illnesses chronic and some, a passing albeit very difficult stage in one’s life. I wish this conversation had been a more active part of my childhood. Instead, our parents were told by their parents to be stricter, more disciplinarian, to bring up kids who were treated more like pets, and less like individual minds and bodies.

Human beings have quite the capacity for denial. But the burden of the blame can’t only be on the shoulders of those in the dark. Education systems exist to disseminate key knowledge to the citizens of a city, state, country. There was an over-emphasis on physics, chemistry and biology. We Indians grew up almost oblivious to psychology,  learning to respect Great Mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell.Psychology was relegated to the ranks of an optional subject that one only chose if they were either too “incapable” or too “kooky”. And only at the age of 15, and only if families were liberal enough to allow their offspring this choice in the first place. Workplaces gave sick leaves, but paid maternity leave is  still a fight, and mental health leaves? Unheard of, and unacceptable.

Age 8, I was taken to a dingy clinic in South India to see a psychologist for the first time, after struggling with problems at night for too many years. The pressure of knowing he would later talk to my mother made  me mostly clam up in conversation, but I responded genuinely to two visual-based psychometric tests. (In case you’re curious, I did wonderfully in Raven’s Progressive Matrices, affirming my visual intelligence skills but failed quite miserably in Koh’s block test, which explained my nearly non-existence direction sense, perception confusions and other spatial challenges).

Age 12 and in Sharjah, my uncle, quite accurately and after close observation told me that I had a ‘normal’ laugh and an ‘abnormal’ laugh, where I just did not know how to calm down. To him I responded with a defensive touch of denial, but ran back to Dr Google because he was confirming my suspicions of something being not quite right with me. That search led to nothing. How do you find other words to define yourself when you do not know where to start?

Age 15, I began to immerse myself in the world of abnormal psychology and identified a bit too much with the term ‘bipolar’. Mind you, this was after over 10 years of confusion, interspersed with moments of great self-doubt over my sanity. This prompted me to begin bugging my mother to take me to the psychologist. I was not taken as seriously as I wanted to be (which was a LOT), and ended up discouraging myself from visiting.

Age 19 in Bangalore, while crashing at an aunt’s, my little brother came to visit.  It had been a year of immense ups and downs. I had decided to bite the bullet, and take myself to the shrink. It was only to my 13 year old brother I confided in, as I snuck out to receive the sentence of a lifetime, under  the guise of ‘watching a movie’ – The Fault in Our Stars. I returned with a confirmed diagnosis, two weeks worth of anti-anxiety pills, and the unshakeable  feeling that there was most certainly a fault in my stars.

I opened up to one friend and my mother about this soon enough, because I was intensely overwhelmed and could not stop overthinking. But the friend was not equipped with enough knowledge, and the mother was several miles plus an ocean away in sunny Sharjah, while I was in cloudy Bangalore. I was also convinced that I was a burden to everyone around me, and seeking out help for my mental health almost felt like I was slicing parts of myself open.

Age 21, married to my first full-time job as the content manager at Campus Diaries. I nearly lost my job after over 1 year of fantastic work, due to a severe mental breakdown that I could just not bring myself to open up about until it was too late. My office did not handle my inefficiency well, but the embarrassment I went through gave me the sudden strength to be open about my mental health. I was told to stay on at the company despite my insistence on leaving due to poor performance, and did some good work before leaving in July for a design diploma.  

Yesterday, at the age of 24, I was at a Starbucks in Andheri, Mumbai, working furiously. Alone and stuck with a lot of work in a typically overcrowded coffee shop, there was only one table that had another typical solo girl with work. Turns out this stranger was someone who had applied online and been selected (by me!) to participate in Living Stories, but had been unable to make it as she was traveling to escape the floods. This serendipitous meeting resulted in a conversation about psychiatric medication, and our mental illnesses (we both have bipolar disorder of different types, with recurring episodes of borderline personality). For the first time in my life I had a conversation about seemingly painful, difficult things with a girl I had only exchanged a maximum of 8 emails with.

It felt neither painful nor difficult. Truth flowed out of our mouths with minimal cringing. I was reassured and encouraged to continue my medication despite the ravaging effect it is having on my stomach and the not-so-desirable effect it is having on my desires. Nestled in a coffee shop that was mostly loudly discussing either work, or relationships, here we were, baring our mental illnesses in the world like it was the most normal thing to do.

And it is. As it should be for everybody.

That is why Living Stories was born. What if there was a place for people to listen to the mental health experiences of so many different individuals who each have their own journeys? Will the listener, after having listened to an absolute stranger, be able to empathise with their own loved ones better? After all, a lack of emotional attachment could prompt better judgement. That’s how good movies and good literature prompt social change as well, right?

With Living Stories being three cities down and many more to go, I can safely say that we are sparking a supremely important conversation across the country. Over 175 people have attended in the three cities and spoken to 70+ books. Each of them describe various facets of their individual mental health journeys. I myself am a ‘book’. I have found myself having conversations I never imagined I would. People have thanked me profusely for doing this for heartbreaking reasons; one with a hysterical mother and a childhood splattered with violence, one with a history of drug abuse and attempts at suicide, one with a mother who killed herself out of depression, one with months of asylum experience who requested me to try medication. I have goosebumps as I type these words, because such is the nature of the truth we are suppressing – thereby inflicting deep, unseen wounds in the minds of many.

It is going to take time to undo years of damage done by burying truth beneath layers of shame and silence. But the time is now. And there is no going back on the fact that #MentalHealthMatters.