Dear community,
In honor of National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, I’m so pleased to feature the thoughtful perspectives of my friend and colleague, Pooja Mehta.
💫 Spread the light with Dr Devika B. Conversations that dispel stigma and stereotypes and instead, spread hope and light — also on YouTube, Apple, Spotify
Because stigma festers in the dark and scatters in the light
About Pooja Mehta:
Pooja Mehta serves with me on the National Board of Directors at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). She’s been a powerful mental health advocate since she was 19 and lives with anxiety with auditory hallucinations, depression, and lost her brother Raj to suicide in 2020.
Hear from her on:
- How she centers being a South Asian woman in her advocacy
- What current suicide prevention efforts miss
- An annual tradition in honor of her brother, Raj, to foster kindness and connectedness
- How to craft a lived experience message to drive policy change
Trigger warning: In this episode, we talk about death by suicide, suicidal ideation, anxiety, auditory hallucinations, and depression.
Above, you’ll find the audio and video recording of the podcast episode and on the Substack app/website, you’ll find a transcript. If you’d prefer to watch this conversation on YouTube, please click here.
Click here to catch up on other Spread the light columns, in addition to other posts organized by column type, going back to our newsletter’s launch in January 2023.
If you or a loved one needs help for a mental health crisis, don’t hesitate to call or text 988 — or reach them online here. Find other resources here, search for a US treatment facility here, and find a US-based therapist here.
Wishing you light,
Dr Devika Bhushan
“I am the child of immigrants — many of us are — and we grew up hearing how our parents, our peers, our contemporaries left everything they knew to start a life in an entirely foreign country with the intention of making life better for themselves, with the intention of making life better for their children.
And I would say that taking care of your mental health is not only a part of that, it is fundamental to that.” —Pooja Mehta
PM: There's so many rooms that I walk into where I'm the only person who looks like me. There are so many places that I go to and I give talks and I give presentations and I'm the only name that they're stumbling on.
And even in South Asian spaces, I'm the only one who is speaking about my mental illness — sometimes to the chagrin of the people in the room: ‘Oh no, this isn't something that we deal with. You just need to do more yoga.’
And so one of the things that I really try to be intentional about is whenever I'm talking about mental health, I'm wearing something — there's part of my physical appearance — that is South Asian or South Asian-inspired. It's jewelry; it's wearing a kurti, sometimes wearing a bindi — like really tuning into that part of me in a way that can't be overlooked.
And then also in South Asian spaces, being very intentional about, ‘No, I want to have this conversation and I want to talk to you as a South Asian person. I want to talk to you as an Aunty or Uncle about this topic.’
And I want to do it from a place of compassion, from a place of understanding, in a way that invites you into the conversation rather than calling you out for not already being a part of it.
DB: We are, for better, for worse, pallbearers of our diaspora, of the immigrant community in the US. And there's a way in which people want for that to be this shiny, sort of ideal version of what a person can be. And there still is a deep level of shame around experiences of illness, and specifically mental illness, that are hidden. And I love how much intentionality you put into bringing even a visual piece of your South Asian identity into spaces and rooms where you're the only person who looks like you having conversations openly about what it takes to have a world where everybody has the resources, the access, the opportunity to have optimal mental health.
