Don’t blame it on wokeness

It isn’t social awareness but realisation of power imbalance that leads to depression

THE 2015-16 NATIONAL Mental Health Survey of India revealed that one out of every 20 Indians was depressed, which means that over five per cent of Indians are struggling with depression. Given the systemic shame associated with this illness, the disparity in access to mental health treatments, awareness, and the sheer imbalance of the number of patients versus healthcare professionals, it won’t be wrong to assume that even in 2015, the number was much higher than recorded. And if so, then today, in 2024, the situation is much worse.

This problem, however, isn’t limited to India. There is a rise in depression and allied mental illnesses globally. While there are several reasons behind this epidemic, a new study posits social awareness could be a leading cause of depression among those “woke”.

Let me begin by saying that I take offence to the term woke, and the idea of bracketing people from all classes, castes, and socioeconomic brackets under one small umbrella category of “wokeness”. It comes across as a reductive term mostly used for and by the perpetually online.

That said, there is merit in examining how social awareness impacts our mental health. A good place to begin would be home. My mental health journey began much before I realised there were things such as depression, anxiety or complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD). All things I struggle with. I come from a seemingly “normal” family with loving parents. Yet I have a deep mistrust of the world. My child sexual abuse trauma, about which I have written in detail, naturally is a culprit. It certainly made me vulnerable to the curse of depression.

But I worked through that trauma; I processed it. Yet, the depression lurks — waiting to make a return. Most recently, in a conversation with my mother, she brought up the impending elections. She asked me to consider not returning home to cast my vote. It would be better for your mental peace — she doesn’t use the word depression — if you stayed away from this chaos.

My mother, who once threw away Paulo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die because it was making me, in her words, sad, knows that I respond rather adversely to social stimuli.

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, an unnamed character says, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” And while blowing one’s own trumpet isn’t the best of traits, I believe that my intelligence and my ability to empathise make me vulnerable to the world around me and its conflicts.

I remember feeling agitated when someone in my small town talked about wanting a “fair girl” to marry their son. I remember slipping into despair when the boys I was friends with talked about girls they liked and the ones they felt repulsed by as a “joke”. I remember crying while watching scenes of police violence in Jamia Millia Islamia in 2019. And I remember experiencing panic attacks when the Metoo movement was at its peak.

These are big and small events that affected my mental health. But where does this impact stem from? Is it fear? Is it helplessness? Is it the devastating idea of living in a world where each day moves away from any semblance of humanity? It perhaps is all these things.

Being aware of the things happening around you indeed affects you. But it’s the rare amalgamation of life events, including but not limited to how you were brought up, the ideas you were exposed to, the books you read, the films you watched, the friends you made, and the lovers you encountered that shape you. There is also the awareness your privilege afforded you, the access you had to safe spaces, and the more conversations you were encouraged to have that have made way for empathy, rage, and care.

Simply put, the less homogenous the group of people you meet, the more wide your worldview. A problem I have often had with the privatisation of education hinges on this very idea that such spaces, while “safe”, don’t have any room for dissent or even a different worldview. It is people of a certain caste and class sharing a classroom — and then it doesn’t matter which philosopher you read. But the role of education is also to make you uncomfortable in your skin. Only then is empathy possible.

To return to the point of the study on “woke” people, I reject the assertion that social awareness is causing depression. When in fact, it is the realisation that there is a power imbalance in the world. It is wellknown that unequal societies have a higher percentage of depressed people. But when I look at these studies that point towards economic disparity as a cause of depression in the West, I understand that, but I also know that income disparity, even in countries such as America, is tied to the ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. When you look at the global south, especially India, you have an exhausting cornucopia of caste, sub-caste, religion, gender, sexuality, and then class.

That political awareness can make a person clinically depressed is only viable if that person can look at the one suffering through the lens of humanity. This is why some people can murder for the wrong kind of meat, while someone else can protest against such killings. And feel the pain of depression and anxiety when they cannot change the social reality of the world.

Indurkar is a writer, editor, and poet from Jabalpur. She is the author of It’s All in Your Head, M