Pennings

Most often we love our bodies. We take care of it, pamper it and nurture it. Be it getting lured by beauty products or the sudden bouts of realization wherein we feel we are not eating nutritious food and then start the healthy diet sprees – we are more often than not too focused on looking after ourselves physically. As the saying goes – a healthy mind lives in a healthy body and on reading that line, the importance of a healthy body is sharply underlined. However, in this day and age, it has become necessary to see how we should nurture a healthy mind, how we should make one reside in a healthy body.

When I was in college, pursuing my graduation back in 2015, I first witnessed what my peers from the psychology department would call a mental health week. They created visual art with uplifting and positive messages around the self and put it all over the college campus including the hostel where several girls lived. I remember going to fill my water bottle at the water cooler and staring at this bright yellow poster with a girl sketched on it who was saying out loud – “I am capable, I am driven.” Whenever I would look at that poster, it would fill me with immense motivation. I would come back to my room energized and do whatever I was doing with extra vigour. In an entire day of toiling hard in the college and facing victories and defeats, visits to the water cooler and meeting the young lady on the yellow poster would rejuvenate me to carry on.

Now, not that I was going through a so called “phase” as can be deduced from the above perhaps, conversations around taking care of our minds had begun then. Probably, it was being noticed how silence and brushing under the carpet are the first steps we take when we are even slightly troubled or disturbed by something. Cut to 2025, a full decade later, mental health awareness is reaching zeniths. There are influencers talking about it, businesses promoting it through mental health journals, therapists forming a genre of professionals, IT folks creating apps around it, employers fostering it in their organisations and the government passing a bill towards it.

So what has really changed in all these years and how do we look at this change so as to make sense of the increased number of initiatives for keeping one’s mental health in order. To being with, I believe the number of people who were being engulfed by stressors and had no way towards an outlet of complex emotions, pushed the world to take note of silences that were so loud, that someone had to speak up. And then of course, whichever brave soul spoke first, had a domino effect on others who joined in because it is not just political propaganda that spreads too fast, it is also the flicker of hope and change that can catch up like wild fire. And so here we are today, discussing, analyzing, promoting, battling and even reshaping the idea of mental health.

There is no one in this whole wide world who can say that they have not fought their minds at some point or the other or that they don’t keep doing it from time to time. The difference however, might lay in the frequency with which one is fighting those battles. Some go to war once in a while, whereas some are meddling with it quite regularly. This again points to some crucial facts. There are people who still cannot mention it to their family members, to their primary care givers, that they are feeling down, that they would like to take care of their well-being as they don’t feel well in very simple straightforward terms. We are so swift in letting mom know that we have a fever because we know how socially acceptable the illness is and we will be taken very good care of if mom gets to know our body is heating up and we feel weak inside. On the other hand, in many homes, dad will not even notice if his dearest girl has a shift in her mood, that she is quieter than usual, is withdrawing and needs a helping hand. The concept of the mind being sick cannot be imagined, let alone realized, accepted and cared for. On the other hand, there are parents who understand the nuanced workings of their children’s minds primarily because they understand their minds too and hence are in a better position to help their children. They make their children feel noticed, seen, heard and cared for – essential requisites to build a human connection. Such parents take steps to save their children from any kind of stigma surrounding mental health issues, take active steps to heal their children and knowingly or unknowingly build a lot of awareness for others setting examples and for themselves too.

The world is a tremendously changing place with every passing year becoming and coming with the promise of becoming more and more convoluted, zig-zagged and complicated. Contrast it with life – it is very simple, as my husband says. And so to keep the world and our lives in harmony with each other, we need lesser institutions locking up the so called “mad people”, medicines, doctors and the neighbor aunty ready to gossip about us, and more and more of love, support for each other, acceptance of ourselves and others and an unflinching willingness to extend a shoulder on which others can lean.