Be Friends With Your Problems: Indian Comedians On Mental Health

From doing friendship with your problems to having faith, Tanmay Bhatt, Mallika Dua and others speak on depression.

Mallika Dua and Tanmay Bhat have an important message on mental health. (Photo courtesy: Twitter/altered by The Quint)

Since news broke about 24-year-old Arjun Bhardwaj tragically jumping to his own death from the 19th floor of a hotel in Mumbai, many comedians have taken to their social media accounts to talk about anxiety and depression.

Mallika Dua spoke about how we sometimes do not give our mental health as much importance as our physical health.

Biswa Kalyan Rath spoke about how he dealt with failures in a moving post.

I wasn’t good at anything then... Complete lack of skill, completely unhirable... Suddenly one day, things changed for the better and people who I assumed thought of me as a failure started messaging me saying they were proud of me. People started appreciating my work.

Biswa Kalyan Rath

Sapan Verma, in a similar vein, wrote about his own failures before he found his calling.

I tried seven different jobs for about five years before I found comedy, and another few years to figure out if I’m even good at it.All this stuff that you’re panicking about - it won’t even matter in ten years and you will laugh at yourself for being stupid enough to even think that it did. I still laugh when I remember the time I cried looking at the maths paper.  

Sapan Verma

In this video, Tanmay Bhat explains how problems are never going to leave our side. He says that rather than running away from them, we should “do friendship with them”.

Rohan Joshi succinctly puts across his point. “It’s not worth ending shit over”.

Daniel Fernandes urges those who are depressed to seek professional help in his post.

Quit telling depressed people that it’s going to be okay. Quit flaunting your success story in their face (even though you mean well, your setbacks may not have been caused by the same mental factors as theirs and instead of giving them hope, you might be making it worse for them). Quit telling them to get over it.

Daniel Fernandes 

Vir Das points out that it's important for everyone to recognise symptoms of depression in their friends and family.

Most of the depression battle is lost when the person suffering feels like those around them won’t know how to help, that they might feel like a burden. It’s important for everyone to recognise symptoms of depression in their friends and family so that they know how to reach out and help even if the person suffering hasn’t asked for help.

Vir Das

In a society where mental health has a such a huge stigma attached to it, it’s extremely important to have such voices normalising dialogue surrounding anxiety and depression.

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