Our stories are passé. Long live our stories.
A big shift is under way in the mental health movement.
Sanity is 100% free to read, doesn't accept ads, and is made possible by the support of a small group of paying readers from around the world. Please join them today by contributing what you can.
One morning five years ago, I woke up to an unusual email.
"Dear Dr Goswami," it read, "as co-author of the article The national suicide prevention strategy in India: context and considerations for urgent action, we are pleased to let you know that your article is now available online."
I wanted to reply that they had got the prefix before my surname wrong, because I was no 'Dr'. But I understood how the error must have crept in. You see, The Lancet Psychiatry, the world's most powerful mental health journal, is used to publishing PhD scholars. I couldn't blame them for forgetting to change the salutation for one odd non-PhD author.
So I decided to let it be. I decided not to be a sourpuss. I decided to focus instead on what that morning meant for me – the only Mr among a bevy of illustrious Dr co-authors – many of them my mentors and heroes.
I reminded myself that I had travelled a crazy distance: from plotting ways to self-annihilate to sharing my story in a research paper on suicide prevention that would be read by important people all over the world – people who often have the power to control the destiny of people like me.
I decided to try and park the guilt of hoarding space that should belong to those without my caste, class, or gender privileges, and soak in the heady feeling that our tiny collective dream, Sanity, was now a permanent part of the annals of The Lancet Psychiatry, alongside Harvard and Cambridge et al.
However, that morning I was also clear eyed about one thing: My personal story had been propped up by a unique confluence of factors at a unique time in history. The coronavirus pandemic had given a massive fillip to the mental health conversation. Media coverage of mental health-related topics had jumped 3x both globally and in India. Celebrities from diverse fields were opening up about their personal mental health struggles, which helped destigmatise the topic at least in elite, urban circles.
Finally, another force gave unprecedented impetus to the mental health discourse: Twitter.
In the years before Elon Musk took it over and turned it into an irredeemable cesspool, Twitter served as the online headquarters of the mental health movement. One survey showed that 9 out of 10 Twitter users believed that people were more willing to be honest about their mental health challenges on the platform. A similar number took to Twitter to not feel alone. Seven out of 10 wanted to stay connected with the Twitter mental health community.
My own foray into mental health owed a lot to a diary of my day-to-day experiences I used to maintain on Twitter, which connected me to the wider community and showed me the power of personal storytelling. (Read my in-depth piece about the central role of pre-X Twitter in catalysing the mental health movement below.)
Tanmoy Goswami
Seven years since the onset of the pandemic, the landscape looks vastly different. Twitter as we knew it is extinct. Meanwhile, mental health influencers have mushroomed on Instagram. There is a welcome ordinariness to personal stories, once exoticised as 'brave' and 'inspiring'.
None of this means stigma is dead, and we should all stop telling our stories. Neither does it take away from the extraordinary risks of self-disclosure that people from marginalised communities still have to face. It only means that a section of us, who dominated the mental health conversation, must now find other ways to channel our energies and move from telling our stories to creating room for those left behind.
It also means converting the cultural currency of our lived experience into capital to be invested in shaping policy, participating in research, or influencing funding in the mental health sector.
Admittedly, this won't happen until these spaces are free from gatekeeping and stop treating lived experience experts as just another box to be ticked.
How long will it take for us to get there? I don't know, but I hope it will happen in my lifetime.
That persons with lived experience will not be valued just because of their stories of struggle.
That we – every last one of us – will be seen as bona fide experts with much more to offer than our pain and suffering.
And that the gap between 'Dr' and 'Mr' will not make us feel like impostors, and we will proudly claim the right salutation in spaces we were told we don't belong in.
