SAY Campaign Girls Lina and Geeta at the Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival, Toronto, ON
Please tell us your story. Saying is the most important. We all have something to say. Leave us your comments, write to us, let’s say it beautifully!
Here’s a You Tube link about SAY:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M83qUitJjQ
This summer we started a campaign.I’m turning my personal experience - victories and losses included - into hopefully change for the better, into a bright light onto what we can only hope is the way ahead. And here it is:
SAY is a campaign striving to recognize and legitimize the fight against mental illness (and for harmony of mind) within a South Asian cultural context. It is a knowledge raising campaign that, by sharing stories, providing solid platforms of support, and just initiating discourse, hopes to change the stigma associated with mental illness.
SAY is carrying a resounding voice, reaching out to those negotiating issues of mental wellness and filling up the reserves (creatively or practically) of those family/friends already offering care and encouragement.
In the next few months of the campaign, we’re going to be talking, saying, expressing, discussing, reporting, creating, integrating, engaging in South Asian communities. We’ll share our stories with you, showcase the courage it takes to cope with and overcome the various conditions that result from mental illness. We’ll empower, inspire and clarify. We’ll say what’s been on our minds and say it beautifully.
Contact us at info@saycampaign.com
I’m truly sorry to hear of your loss, and also heartened at your response through this campaign. I grew up as part of the few Indian families in our midwestern town in the United States. My father was diagnosed as “manic-depressive” now known as bi-polar, and was shuttled in and out of psychiatric wards throughout my childhood. He committed suicide when I was 11, my brother was 7. My mother worked so many different jobs in an effort to take care of her three dependents (including my father at times when he was unemployed, and the two of us children). What really exacerbated his condition was the fact his family wanted him to make $40,000 in the ’60s as a low-income graduate student. It broke him, but he struggled to live for as long as he could under the pressure of being the eldest son, and the only son with the ‘privilege’ of being in America.
I have always looked at this as very much a cultural thing — the stigma of dealing with mental illness in isolation. He had more support from a white family who had adopted him into their extended family, than his own parents and siblings who seemed to look to him solely as a provider. It didn’t seem to me that they saw him as a person. The Indian community as well around us seemed to draw away from us. We stopped getting invitations to parties. No one wanted to deal with a single mom. A “widow” as if it was some ugly label, and not a tragic experience that should draw a community closer for that human connection. It enraged me, and for years I was very resentful of other Indian people. Only in college, did I start to make Indian friends again, and realize that not all Indian heritage people were like the community that had abandoned my family.
It’s still painful, but with time and attention, I’ve been able to process it. I keep my name anonymous for my mother’s sake, but I have worked enough to get to a point that I can talk about it. In fact, I consider it a political act. If I can be open about how it’s affected my life, maybe it will help other people to not be ashamed, to seek help, and change things.
Now I realize that economics also played a huge role. While we were middle class, my upbringing was not exactly comfortable. My father struggled terribly to provide for his family, and it broke him. My mother struggled to provide for me and my brother emotionally, financially, to be as reliable as possible, given my father’s instability. My mother worked late night shifts at a fast food place, and going to night school. Money was a constant worry, though she shielded us as much as possible from all this.
All in all, community was an important factor that was totally absent after his death. Since I’ve talked openly about it with friends, I’ve come to realize that many other Indian friends have dealt with suicide in particular, in their families. It’s been rather shocking actually. Thanks for doing this, and I hope many more people share their stories here too.
much love and respect.
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Please tell us your story. Saying is the most important. We all have something to say…..