Actress Deepika Padukone, founder of the Live Love Laugh Foundation (LLLF), launched her first lecture series to discuss the stigma surrounding mental health here on Sunday.
Padma Shri awardee, haematologist and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center was the speaker at the event.
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Dr. Mukherjee, who won Pulitzer Prize for his book The Emperor Of All Maladies, drew parallels between the stigma that cancer faced in 1950s and that mental health faces today. He said there were three forces “that took a disease (cancer) that was stuffed in the back of hospitals and made it the most prominent word in the history of illness”.
The first force, he said, was political, involving policymakers and those in regulatory positions, propelled by health advocate Mary Laskar, who “took on the job of helping launch (President) Nixon’s war on cancer”. It culminated in the inauguration of the National Cancer Institute, an organisation that had scientists, politicians, patients and advocates as its members. Dr. Mukherjee suggested a similar model for mental health in the country.
The second force was social, with advocates working towards destigmatising the disease, resulting in the removal of the blame and victimhood that is often attached to diseases that evoke terror. Women like Rose Kushner, Betty Ford, and ‘Happy’ Rockefeller, he said, played an important part in the movement, helping the focus to shift to “empathy, a desire to relieve suffering, and a want to cure and to treat. This is just as great an achievement as landing on the moon, or cracking an atom.”
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The final set of forces were biological — genetic and pharmaceutical efforts from the medical community and entrepreneurs “to take cancer and understand its molecular mechanism”. This understanding of what cancer was — a mutation in cells — helped in the development of the first chemical therapies.
As the biological understanding of mental illness changes, so will the stigma attached to it. “We now know that much of mental illness is a result of the cooperation of genetics and the environment,” said Dr. Mukherjee.
He said that there was a need to resist “the carcinogen of anxiety” that seems to pervade our society today, much like we have resisted other carcinogens like cigarette smoking.
The talk was followed by a discussion with Ms. Padukone, who said in an interview that the idea of the lecture series “is to have people who understand the importance of mental health and mental illness and also people who are in a place to shape that conversation”.
Anna Chandy, a psychologist and chairperson of the board of trustees, LLLF, said, “Unless you have someone in family or you have been touched by it, stigma of mental illness is not something you can easily relate to. Dr. Mukherjee talks about his own understanding of it, having had some experiences within the family and like Ms. Padukone, he is very open about it.”
The LLLF is a charitable trust that was set up in 2015 to give hope to persons experiencing stress, anxiety and depression. Ms. Padukone had suffered from mental health illness in the past.
The LLLF has held public campaigns to destigmatise mental illness, organised awareness programmes in schools and sensitisation workshops for doctors. It is now expanding its work to include research and a continuing medical education programme for doctors in tandem with the Public Health Foundation of India and the Association of Healthcare Providers.
The talk was attended by Ayushman Bharat CEO Indu Bhushan, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, Department of Biotechnology Secretary Renu Swarup, Indian Council of Medical Research Director General Balram Bhargava, Translational Health, Science and Technology Institute Executive Director Gagandeep Kang, Sanjeev Sanyal, principal economic adviser in the Ministry of Finance and Shakti Sinha, director of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.