DE-STIGMATISING THERAPY
Dear
Zindagi’s
patient-doc sessions – debatable and unconventional though they are – mark a
rare effort by a usually indifferent Bollywood to normalise mental healthcare
By
Anna MM Vetticad
This is not a
review of Dear Zindagi. I wrapped up that job on the day of its release.
This column is devoted to one aspect of the film: the portrayal of mental
health.
Those who have seen
Dear Zindagi would know that Alia Bhatt plays Kaira, a talented
cinematographer who harbours a deep-seated resentment towards her parents. She
is also so afraid of being hurt in romantic relationships that she withdraws
from each one before the man she is dating has a chance to first back out. When
sleep goes AWOL from her life one day, Kaira turns to a clinical psychologist —
Dr Jehangir Khan, played by Shah Rukh Khan — for relief.
As an American TV
serial junkie and Hollywood buff, I am used to watching therapy sessions on
screen. They have ranged from the realism of Law and Order: Special Victims
Unit, where Sergeant Olivia Benson gets help after being abducted and held
hostage by a violent sexual predator, to the comical money-mindedness of Dr
Linda Freeman in the Charlie Sheen-starrer Two And A Half Men, and the
OTT unprofessionalism in Anger Management starring Sheen with Selma
Blair.
Hindi cinema, for
the most part, has alternated between ignoring/avoiding mental fitness and
swinging wildly to the other end of the spectrum with harmful caricatures,
ignorance and the insensitive labelling of mental illness as “paagalpan
(lunacy)”. In that context, Dear Zindagi is gigantically significant.
In a nation where a
“dimaag ka doctor” is widely seen as a doc for extreme situations, here
is a woman in therapy despite displaying no visible signs of what Indian
society might consider a health problem. She is not apparently severely
depressed, she is highly functional and a successful professional to boot, she
is lively, she appears to be enjoying life, and her issues with her parents are
likely to be seen as non-issues in a culture that requires us to canonise and
deify our madres and padres.
Of course she also
does not bear any of the physical symptoms Hindi cinema has traditionally
dished out to audiences: wild hair, unkempt look, flailing arms, screaming or
complete silence. The seeming
normality of Kaira is, to my mind, what makes Dear Zindagi almost
revolutionary in the Indian social context.
This brings us to
the patient-doctor sessions in Dear Zindagi. If your vision is not
clouded by SRK’s sexiness as Doc Jehangir (forgive me for the frivolous aside),
it should be clear that what is depicted here is not conventional therapy. For
one, Jehangir’s informality with an emotionally vulnerable youngster may make
for fun cinema but could cause misunderstandings in the real world.
Now, since I have
not been to a therapist myself, I have spent the week speaking to friends who
have, and to psychologists and psychiatrists. One friend tells me that if
anyone made a film literally recounting her conversations with her therapist,
“it would be the most boring film in the world”. Others agree. Instead of the
banter between Kaira and Doc Jehangir, imagine a narrative that foregrounds
long monologues from a patient with occasional interventions from a
professional listener who actively stays in the background. Such a film would
almost certainly occupy a less commercial, less mass-targeting space in
Bollywood despite SRK and Bhatt’s mammoth star appeal.
The question we
must confront then is about the pluses and minuses of a trade-off between
authenticity and cinematic licence to make a popular film on a hitherto
untouched subject. No doubt Dear Zindagi de-stigmatises therapy and the
quest for emotional well-being sans sermons. The film’s resulting entertainment
value gives it the potential to reach a large number of people. Is this
positive a sufficient excuse for any inaccuracy in the portrayal of those
sessions?
Writing for the
website Scoopwhoop, Mumbai-based clinical psychologist Sonali Gupta objects,
among other things, to what she sees as Jehangir in Dear Zindagi suggesting
solutions to Kaira. She says: “We don’t want clients pursuing therapy in the
hope that therapy is a quick fix, where therapists give advice and enlighten
you with wisdom. As I always say, there is no right or wrong, it is the client
who chooses his path and leads the therapy process, while the therapist plays
the role of facilitator.”
Gupta has initiated
a crucial debate. Without for a moment presuming to know more about therapy
than a therapist would, consider this though: My takeaway from this film as a
viewer was the opposite; for me a lasting memory from Dear Zindagi is of
the doc pointing out to Kaira that it was she, not he, who arrived at her
answers.
It is possible
other viewers may see it differently and start visiting clinics with incorrect
expectations, thus adding to the patient misconceptions that therapists have to
clear. Yet the film would prove worthwhile if it aids even one individual in
overcoming their mind blocks against therapy, while simultaneously generating
public discussions, which in turn may prod Dear Zindagi’s
writer-director Gauri Shinde, or perhaps another filmmaker, to work harder at
making that next script even closer to reality yet equally entertaining.
Until then, Shinde
will hopefully acknowledge this criticism while accepting the well-deserved
kudos coming her way for dragging therapy away from the realm of old-style Bollywood
“paagalkhanas (lunatic asylums)” to a non-intimidating space that you
and I and Everyperson might enter without fear.
(This article
was first published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on December 3, 2016.)
Link to column published in The Hindu Businessline:
Related Link: Anna M.M.
Vetticad’s review of Dear Zindagi
Note: I’m happy to inform you that Film Fatale has won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award 2015 for ‘Commentary and Interpretative Writing’. You can click here to read all the Film Fatales published in 2015 (and from the launch of the column in February 2014):
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/author/anna-mm-vetticad/article6316861.ece Thank you dear readers and Team Hindu Businessline for your constant support. J Anna
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