[ MOTHER’S DAY SPECIAL ]

MENTAL HEALTH CRUSADER NEERJA BIRLA SHOWS HOW EMPOWERING YOUR CHILDREN TO MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS CAN BE ENRICHING AS WELL AS HEART-WRENCHING

Neerja Birla delivered her first child in 1994 and experienced her first bout of postpartum depression She was happy to be a mother, yet, she felt strangely depressed and weighed down

“Why am I feeling this way?” she wondered, and it took her a great amount of resilience, self-belief and a spiritual connect to snap out of it

Neerja is the wife of industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla and belongs to one of India’s most prominent business families She is mother to three grown up children: Ananya, 25, Aryaman, 22 and Advaitesha, 16, two of whom are now young adults making choices of life and career with strong, independent thinking, just as their mother taught them to But that’s a story for the latter half of this piece

“My postpartum depression hit me hard,” Neerja reminisces

“It made me read up and realise that I wasn’t the first mother to have experienced it, nor would I be the last Postpartum depression is a physiological, hormonal thing; it’s a neurotransmitter imbalance, which causes anxiety I was able to overcome it because I was strong, but I realised I would have been able to deal with it more easily had I got better help”

MIND/MATTER

Today, Neerja Birla runs Mpower, an organisation that champions the cause of mental health across geographies and classes, providing a listen and giving advice to anyone who needs to talk, placing the health of the mind on par with physical health, and wiping off the stigma that comes attached to it

But it wasn’t her own experience with depression that got her to start Mpower “I became a mother years ago It was more recently in the schools I work with that I noticed the need for mental health awareness,” she says “Historically, traditionally and culturally, one has never given importance to mental health It is always taken for granted Anything to do with ‘personal feelings’ doesn’t matter If you are not strong, it exposes you to vulnerabilities, and you don’t know how to cope Generally, the advice is, ‘Shove your feelings under the carpet Push them away You feel if you don’t pay attention to them, they’ll just go away”

That, Neerja warns, is the biggest mistake

“We may not want to go to the dentist because we are scared of going to a dentist,” she says, offering an analogy “But the truth is, if we do not go, our toothache will not go away either!”

The biggest problem is that a mental health issue is considered a stigma “It is a taboo topic of sorts Even if people are aware of it, the feeling is ‘What are people going to say?’ I want mental health to be an issue that’s comfortable to discuss over the family dinner table,” says Neerja “We must ease it into being a normal problem, encouraging discussions that’ll eventually get rid of the stigma ‘Therapist’ no longer

“I WAS ABLE TO OVERCOME POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION BECAUSE I WAS STRONG, BUT I REALISED I WOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DEAL WITH IT MORE EASILY

HAD I GOT BETTER HELP”