Hi world.

I am really angry.

Disclaimer: This is just my opinion. I know that mental health is a very important and serious concern and for the same reason I have tried being as sensitive and as politically correct as I could, but if in the process of expressing myself, I have offended anyone, then please please correct me.

My intentions are only to start a conversation and be of whatever help I possibly can be.

Vadodara is a small city and just this week, I have heard and read about 9 suicide cases. There might be more that did not air on the news or weren’t reported.

We have lost so much this past year; so much time, joy, money, and most of all- lives. It has been tough and I know how these trying times have wrapped everyone in a thick blanket of thorns; thorns made of poverty, of depression, of hunger, of fear, of loneliness!

But has it gotten so lonely that people do not see the point of living?

Look, I realize my privilege. I have had hot food on my plate, a safe roof on my head, internet, friends and family throughout the lockdown. I also had the luxury of seeking professional help when my mental health was not so good.

Ouch, my heart hurts as I refer to therapy as a luxury, because it truly is not! A good, stable mental health is not a luxury, it is a necessity! And in these trying times, it is as much a necessity as the vaccine because people are not as scared of the virus now as they are of loneliness and hunger!

Seeking help for one’s mental health is so expensive. Therapy charges around 500 bucks per hour! How will an adult struggling to put food on the table afford that? Where will a child who is too afraid to share their unhappy thoughts with their parents get that kind of money from? Can’t we make professional help free for those who even though need it terribly, cannot afford it at all?

No, don’t tell me that the professionals need to make a living too because the government has all these schemes and helplines for affordable healthcare available to all, then how come there are no free therapists and psychologists available for people to reach out to?

Why doesn’t the government come up with some way to make mental health less of a taboo and actually recognize it as an integral factor contributing to being healthy?

No, I am not just blaming the government, I have a bone to pick with the media too! These news channels and their social media handles keep posting about the suicide cases and updates on them daily with nonsensical headlines as if it is a soap opera plotline. Not only are they insensitive about the life lost, and the family’s grief but they are also in some abstruse way publicizing the concept of suicide.

Wait let me explain the last line. Read about the spike in the rate of suicide cases in India after we lost some influential people to the same demon. No, I am not saying there were no suicides before or there was no sadness and pain before. All I am saying is, we humans are very naive and our brains are terribly impressionable.

Remember when the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why came out and girls in the states took their lives after recording tapes just like the protagonist of the show?

I feel we romanticize pain or at least I do, I am better able to write that way and I also empathize with myself by doing that, and yes I do realize that it is not healthy but it’s human tendency. No?

So when a helpless, extremely disturbed and lonely person sees that someone just like them took their life to escape this cruel world, they romanticize this escape and perhaps knowing that someone else has taken the same step is exactly the little push they needed to go off the deep end.

We really need to stop sharing news about some student who committed suicide because of their anxieties before the exam because there might just be another anxious student biting their nails on the other end of the screen. Stop telling the world that a man who could not send his children to a good school took his life because there might just be a woman driving her car back home to her hungry kids after the 50th rejected interview of the day listening to the radio.

We do not know what a person with suicidal tendencies might be going through in their head. I tried imagining to at least empathize and find a way to help but that pain must be so heavy that I just couldn’t. 

But I still believe that I can help, I need to.

So this is me trying.

I want to make enough noise that the authorities do something about providing better mental healthcare, enough noise that the media becomes more sensitive, enough noise that people having suicidal thoughts take a minute and think about that one person who will mourn their death till the day they themselves go and seek help.