Destigmatising mental health

Most patients and their families prefer being in the denial mode

Earlier this week, Siddhartha Mukherjee, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and a world-renowned doctor, raised an important point on mental health issues. The doctor drew parallels between the stigma that cancer faced in the 1950s and that mental health faces today. Cancer patients, he said, “were then stuffed in the back of hospitals” till increasing awareness removed the stigma attached with the illness. His talk at a public event centred around three forces, which he felt needed to be addressed. The first force is political — for mental health to be recognised as a public health crisis, stakeholders in the