Growing up in the vibrant embrace of the Gujarati community in Leicestershire, I have seen first-hand how traditional values like familial reputation and avoiding sharam-fueled mental health stigma.
As a child, I was taught that we must paint our lives in a landscape of perfection, in fear of the ‘gossip monsters’ (the South Asian aunties in my community) and their ugly retaliation upon us.
Openly having a mental health condition doesn’t exactly fit into this. Instead, I found that people perceived it as a weakness. In fact, I would argue that this decades-old gossip culture in the South Asian community is one of the core reasons why mental health stigma is so widespread in this community.
“Fear of gossip about children’s ‘madness’” was actually proven to dissuade British South Asian families from accessing mental health services – making the detrimental nature of this mentality starkly apparent.
Speaking with health professionals and other South Asian individuals about their experiences, I embarked on a journey that revealed the complexity of this culture of shame, which exists in a tangled web of intergenerational struggles, cultural differences and a profound lack of understanding about mental health itself.
By Tiyanna Mistry