#9 Mental Health, Working Women & Smart Books

Hey there! This week we talk about why we need more conversations on mental health, the unpaid care economy and some books that are too smart for us.

The Need For Better Conversations

- Diti

The death of a Bollywood actor earlier this year has snowballed into a series of chaotic events that have now reached the point where the government and the media are using all their resources to go after film stars, in a time when much bigger things deserve their attention. Minute details about this case are taking up valuable space in my brain even without taking an active interest in it. The case has revealed a lot of things about us as a society, our ability to turn a tragic death into money-making entertainment, the sorry state of Indian journalism, the misogyny in reportage and the extent to which Indian audiences are gullible to barely disguised distractions, along with our understanding of mental illness, or lack thereof.

When Sushant Singh Rajput’s death was declared a suicide, the media took it upon themselves to use images, videos and film clips of happier times to prove that it was not possible for a successful, seemingly cheerful man to have any form of mental illness. To begin with, in a country where most do not consider mental illness to be at par with other ailments it is very hard to convince anyone about the seriousness of mental health. Denial of vulnerability and emotions in men is very commonplace, however, the media’s reportage of the case right from the start added fuel to that fire. Regardless of whether SSR suffered from depression, the representation of the case belittles experiences of all those men battling with their mental illnesses and takes us several steps back in the fight to make depression not a taboo in this country.

Keeping the mainstream media’s coverage of SSR’s death aside, social media was taking another route altogether, which was somehow equally harmful. People took to their Instagram stories to show off their performative wokeness by putting up posts about the importance of mental health and offering their friends a shoulder to cry on if needed. This came along with posts crying nepotism because of course the best way to discuss the harm that bullying may cause to someone’s mental health is to bully another bunch of people. The warriors who took up the cause of SSR, a certain Bollywood actress included, figured that their outrage and opportunity to have the spotlight on them was more important than extending their courtesy to the people they were talking about. Far from opening up a healthy conversation about depression and spotting the signs of mental illness in those close to you even when they look absolutely fine, the events following SSR’s death shifted the conversation altogether.

For multiple days after the news broke, it became impossible to open Instagram without being faced with people asking their friends to talk to them when they were feeling down because depression and suicide are not the right options. Although many of them were people with little to no context, they had good intentions galore. But the main thing they lacked was the ability to give professional help to those among their followers they were lending an ear to. This itself trivialises the struggles of a great number of people. Depression is not sadness and a person battling suicidal thoughts is going to find very little comfort from a layman’s words even if they do find it in themselves to reach out. If you think that I am making a mountain out of a molehill, let me tell you what can happen if the same thing is taken to its logical end, monetising the trending posts. 

Fashion influencer Santoshi Shetty offered ‘positive energy and good vibes’ to any of her followers going through a difficult time for a ‘nominal fee’. I won’t even get started on the false idea that someone can choose to not be depressed by ‘thinking good thoughts’ or ‘adopting a positive attitude’. Dear Instagram activists, drinking water is not a cure-all! For someone who has an influence on so many people that the word is part of her job title, this is not only an irresponsible move but a downright ignorant one. Yes, the Instagram post was pulled down by Shetty but that came only after she faced major repercussions online. Opening up a conversation about mental health does not mean offering advice, well-meaning or otherwise, with no professional experience. It means educating oneself and spreading awareness about the issue while making information about actual resources available. Imagine the reach Shetty could have had only by sharing reliable and accessible resources along with information about places where people can reach out for professional help! And there are people with even bigger platforms making statements that are even more problematic.

Yes, we need to talk about mental health and this conversation needs to percolate into all spheres of society. But there also needs to be a check on the narrative that is forming about the issues. What’s the use of talking about depression when the statements made come from a place of absolute ignorance? I’m looking at you Kangana! Seeking help while battling with mental illness should be normalised but so should getting that help from professionals with experience in the field. The fight is not only about destigmatising mental illness enough that we can talk about it to our parents but it is also about keeping misconceptions away from those conversations. For someone in this country who frequently watches Arnab Goswami or Navika Kumar, the standout performers in terms of turning a tragedy into entertainment, or happens to be a fan of Kangana Ranaut willing to take her at her word this becomes very difficult.

In the current climate mental health is one of the most important things that need to be talked about. With the uncertainty of the future, employment being at its lowest and the pressures of 2020, the world is a scary place to be in right now. There couldn’t be a worse time for the media to push warped ideas of mental illness. For a topic considered a taboo in this country, I have heard the word ‘depression’ far too many times in the last few months. Unfortunately, never in the way that it should be, we just took a few steps backwards in this fight.

• It is difficult to seek help, especially since going to therapy comes with red ‘taboo’ sign in India. There are resources out there that can make it easier. While for allies the first step should be to educate yourselves. Read: Therapy In India

• You can find caste sensitive therapists here: The Blue Dawn

• The pandemic has not only affected our physical health but it has also taken a toll on everyone’s mental health. Read: Firstpost

• Indians need to be more aware about the implications of a missing infrastructure required to deal with mental illness in the country. Read: The Caravan

• The media plays a great role in setting the narrative around mental health, especially when it comes to men. The SSR case is just the most recent example. Read: Feminism In India

• In our country, private chats are flashed on news channels while it is not important for us to know where our public funds are going. Read: The Print

Where Are All The Women Workers?

- Sneha

Should housewives be paid for their work? This is a popular debate topic you may have come across at least once. Essentially asking money in exchange for the work done by women in their households. Sounds a bit bizarre if it’s the first time you hear it. It’s their own home, right? They live there, why would you need to be given wages for washing your own dishes? Truly bizarre, no? Not really. The simple idea behind it is if you pay someone else to do a particular task, then everyone else doing that task must be paid for as well. But before we dive into the economics of it, let’s first look at the place women hold in the workforce. 

Women’s participation in the labour force in India is dismally low and it keeps falling each year. In 2020 it fell to 20.33%. At its peak in the past 2 decades, the number stood at 31.7%. One would think that as time passes and more women are educated, they would get employed in larger numbers. But clearly, that isn’t happening. If this was Twitter, someone would reply saying “but that’s because women are too lazy to work ya.” in all caps. Unfortunately, for that guy, this isn’t the reason. While there is a positive aspect to it - more girls are enrolling in colleges and thus are not working, there are negative reasons as well and that is women not working outside their homes due to social and familial pressure and conditioning from a young age of a woman’s responsibilities and her place as a homemaker. (Aurat ghar ki lakshmi, saraswati sab hai, bas aurat sirf aurat nahi hai.) A very big reason for the missing women in the workforce is because they are doing other things at home. Indian women spend almost 10x more time doing unpaid work than men. Responsibilities like washing, cleaning, cooking, taking care of children, aged people etc are always relegated to women. Which brings me to my topic for the week- the care economy. 

It would be extremely unfair of us to think that the women not enrolled in formal or informal employment are just chilling at home, whiling away their husband’s money. In fact, women taking care of households is what frees up men to take up money-making activities. Housewives are a part of this care economy. Care work refers to services given in taking care or tending to children, household, older family members, hospitality etc. It would include occupations like nursery school teachers, daycare centre workers, domestic help at homes, home nurse and the likes. All of the duties listed above are services offered that are compensated by salaries or wages. As a result, they are calculated in the GDP of the country. However, the same services are also offered by women within their own households, without any remuneration which is not measured or calculated in the GDP. GDP or Gross Domestic Product is essentially the value of all goods and services produced in the country. Even when women's labour within the house is a service she provides, it is not included in the GDP as her services are limited within her own house. There is no real exchange taking place because she is not being paid for it. So when we have economists complaining about women’s unpaid labour, they are not directly asking the husbands to pay their wives, more often they simply want women’s work in the house to be acknowledged and calculated. Unpaid care work can be estimated to about 35% of the total GDP of India if added to it. While in the western countries we have men also contributing significantly to the unpaid work, in India and other developing countries, women do way more of this.

To illustrate, if 2 mothers paid each other for babysitting the other’s baby, their incomes would be calculated in the national data. There is a service being exchanged for money. However, when they stick with their own babies, the service of childcare is still being provided, yet no one is getting paid and it doesn’t get measured anywhere. Of course, the quality of the care provided would differ, but you get the idea. There are also debates about how domestic work can’t be measured accurately considering that the amount of work done and hours utilised would differ depending on factors like geographic location, access to clean water, sanitation services, socioeconomic status, age, number of members in the family. etc. Keep in mind that there are millions of women, even today, who walk miles upon miles to fetch water for their families and physically gather wood for cooking. Their effort goes largely unnoticed and unrewarded. Which is why it is imperative to provide better domestic facilities and services. More child care centres, provision of gas cylinders, door-to-door water connections, public transport, cheaper healthcare, awareness programs for equal distribution of work with men and other family members and many other such policy decisions will help pave the way.

The more women are freed up of their domestic responsibilities, the faster they would be able to join the workforce and earn an income of their own, and more employment opportunities for other women will be created. Financial independence is key to empowerment. There is also a large group of women who work outside their homes for wages and then come back and complete household chores as well. The kind of superwoman responsibilities we wish our mothers wouldn’t have to take. These things go deeper than what public policy responses can fix. We live in an extremely patriarchal world where gender roles are so hardwired into our brains that many men in our country would rather go hungry than cook a meal for themselves. Where women’s bodies and autonomy first belong to her parents then her husband and in-laws. A world where many women have also accepted their fate as such. But till we get to fixing these mindset issues, we first start with getting women out of their houses and into an earning of their own.

Some feminists do believe in women being paid for household chores by looking at it through a Marxist lens and highlighting the exploitation of women’s labour. A radical idea when it first came up in 1975 in Iceland. Read this long but fascinating piece on the “Wages For Housework” protests. Read: The Nation

• To understand the technical, economic side of unpaid care work, read: IIFL

• Why care work is fundamental to a healthy economy:

• Women farmers that work in their husband’s or father’s farms are often not even counted as farmers. So while collecting data on farmers suicides, women are left out completely.  Read: India Today

• GDP as a measure for economic success is turning out to be not as great as we thought: Read: The Economist

• Some interesting 2019 numbers on India’s women in the workforce: Check out: Catalyst

Kabhi Smart Kabhie Stupid

- Diti

Here goes Diti, talking about reading. Again. Bear with me guys!

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I manage to make my way through multiple books in a month. Some books I read because I want to get lost in a story and read about characters that feel real, others I read because I need to escape reality even if it is only for the time that it takes me to finish a 400-page book. There’s a small group of books I read with the sole purpose of feeling stupid and that’s what I want to talk about.

Just this week I finished a book called ‘This Is How You Lose The Time War’ by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, a 2020 release about two women, introduced to us as Red and Blue, who are on opposite sides of a war and fall in love with each other over time and space. Stay with me! The book is written in an epistolary format (in the form of letters), which I generally enjoy, and the letters that the two women (I use that term loosely because they are technically not humans(?). Or at least that is what I understood. I did read the book!) are interspersed with short choppy chapters describing their hit-and-miss meetings in different times and different versions of time.

From my shoddy description of the book’s plot, it is easy to gather that there were several things about it that went completely over my head. Maybe the book wasn’t for me or maybe it is just that I am too stupid to understand all the things that the authors were trying to say. But did I have fun while reading it? Absolutely! 

If there’s one thing that I love about reading out of my comfort zone, that resides in the genres of literary fiction, magical realism, contemporary fiction and the occasional forays into fantasy, it is coming face-to-face with all the things that I do not know. The words used and the scenarios explained make me feel like the author is gifted with more ‘smart genes’ than I will ever have and I actively seek out books that make me feel that way. I mean, I don’t know about you, but at least when I am reading anything by Salman Rushdie or Shashi Tharoor there are five times per page minimum when I stop and question my own intelligence. But I did finish Midnight’s Children. It took me longer to read than all the books on the longlist for last year’s Women’s Prize put together and to date, I can’t say I understood everything, but that is beside the point.

The point is that if we continue to read within our selected genres that make us feel safe and smart we will never be able to expand our horizons. And what is the point of reading if you are not forcing your last brain cells to scratch their heads? Being a person who cannot bring herself to study about things from boring textbooks, fiction and creative nonfiction are my saviours. I am currently coming to terms with all the gaps in my knowledge of world history as I make my way through ‘The Silk Roads’ by Peter Frankopan. If you are one of those who reads Rushdie with ease, don’t laugh at me. There is always someone in this world who is smarter than you. Maybe try understanding quantum physics and that might give you the feeling I am talking about.

Since we are on the topic of books, it probably is just a pet project that gives me the permission to talk endlessly about the books that I read but I am going to soon start ‘This Is What I Read’, a biweekly (once in two weeks) blog about the books I am reading and the ones I love, hate or love hating. Keep a lookout on the blog if it is something that interests you!

Somethings to watch out for this week from India and around the globe:

1. Every once in a while, there will come such an incident that will jolt us awake and force us to recognise what goes on in our country regularly which otherwise we, willfully or unknowingly, ignore. The Hathras case is one of those. We may reach our 5 trillion dollar economy and vikas may come knocking on our doors, but caste and misogyny will refuse to leave. Read this ground report on the gruesome rape followed by the disgusting behaviour of the UP police not even giving the victim her right to a dignified death. Read: Newslaundry

    “Yes, our fault is that we trusted the police. Yes, our fault is that she was a Dalit girl. Yes, our fault is that we didn’t agree for her to be cremated at night. If she was from a Thakur family, none of our mistakes would have been pointed out.”

   Today, the Valmiki women no longer feel safe in the Thakur-dominated village.

   P.S. Also, please refrain from using the victim’s real names on social media, unless explicitly allowed by them. Especially in cases of minors. All the news sources where you see the real names have clearly forgotten about ethics.

2. All 32 accused in the Babri demolition case were freed of charges. Apparently, a bunch of people just randomly decided to raze a mosque down to the ground and there was no conspiracy involved. To understand what this means, check out the headlines of various newspapers covering it. Read: The Wire

3. If you want to watch two grown men calling each other names, may we recommend the first US Presidential Debate 2020 along with some popcorn? Watch the highlights:

   TLDW;
   Biden: You’re so stupid, shut u..
   Trump: *proceeds to say stupid things* No, you’re a stupid loser

   In a perfect climax to it, President Trump and the First Lady have also tested positive for coronavirus. Read: BBC

4. In true 2020 doom-y fashion, a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan has led to the death of 100. Read: Indian Express

5. On the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti, #NathuramGodseZindabad was trending on Twitter. For the uninitiated, Godse is the one who assassinated Gandhi. Interesting. Read: Indian Express

6. Bollywood is not known for its adequate representation for the LGBTQ community. But here’s a list of great Bisexual characters within Indian Cinema. Read: Arre

That’s all from us this week.

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Until next week

Love & Birthday wishes to Mr. Gandhi,

Diti & Sneha