How to shun tropes and find nuance in mental health storytelling
Tanmoy Goswami on telling better mental health stories; media recommendations; learning resources and more
Today is World Down Syndrome Day and everyone is raving about CoorDown’s latest video, No Decision Without Us. Featuring people with diverse disabilities including Down syndrome, dwarfism, locomotor disability, blindness, deafness and limb differences, the video is a call to action to give everyone a seat at the table when making decisions that affect them. The video not only covers policy discussions, but also issues like fire warnings, placement of supplies in a store, and selecting an outfit for your child. Just like last year’s Assume That I Can, CoorDown has come up with another gem many will find useful for advocacy. As always, the audio-described version and visual description are also available.
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For today’s issue, I interviewed a dear friend, Tanmoy Goswami, a user-survivor and creator of India's first solo-run, independent mental health storytelling platform, Sanity. Sanity's mission is to marry the rigour of research and analysis with the soul of lived experience.
[Image Description: Tanmoy, an Indian man with dark hair, a beard, and glasses, sits indoors, looking directly at the camera with a calm expression. He is wearing a dark grey hoodie with red drawstrings and has his left hand resting on his right shoulder.]
Tanmoy is a former fellow of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford; an advisor to the Centre for Global Mental Health at King's College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; and a jury member for the Project SIREN Awards for responsible reporting on suicide prevention in India's English language media.
“Mental health is a sector, like any other sector in the economy”
What are the gaps you see in how the Indian media covers mental health today?
The first gap would be the understanding of mental health as a systemic thing. The appreciation that mental health is a sector, like any other sector in the economy, is sorely missing. Unless we understand the dynamics of the mental health sector, we will not be able to fathom what is going wrong and needs to be set right. Where is the funding coming from? Is it going to the right places? For instance, think about funds utilisation. Whenever there's a new union budget we talk about how the mental health sector does not get enough funding. But whatever little money the sector does get, it is not able to spend it. So naturally then the budget allocation will also reflect that.
We don't yet see mental health reporting as intersectional and breaking out of the healthcare silo. The fact that mental health impacts everything, like climate change, means there is a potential to incorporate mental health messaging in a lot of different kinds of stories. But without understanding the basics of the sector, we cannot jump on to reporting on mental health bots, apps, and whatnot.
What are the harmful Westernised narratives in the Indian media that should be avoided?
The number one problem is the individualisation of mental health. It’s a Western import, where everything is reduced to self-help — it's your problem, here are a bunch of tools, now go fix yourself.
Then, there is the over-medicalisation or pathologization of mental distress; the idea that through pharmaceutical products or technology, you can solve problems that are very deep-rooted, and that have socioeconomic antecedents.
When we give into these Westernised tropes, we forget that as a country that has lived under colonialism for centuries, a lot of our generational psychological issues have been shaped by the memories of oppression and violence at the hands of these colonising powers. Often our [narratives] show a stark lack of self-awareness as a community, especially when we embrace ideas in psychology that have been derived from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) societies.
Having said that, the oppositional dynamic – us against them – also should have its limits because there is a risk that we become so involved in critiquing everything Western that we don't look inwards and introspect about things that are messed up in our communities and societies.
What do you think are very indigenous or Indian problems?
We've had excellent models of community-oriented care and community-centered thinking, and we are not using that wisdom at all. We have not been able to disseminate this wisdom using technology, for instance. The World Health Organization has identified community mental health models built in India in its handbook of best practices. But do we celebrate that as a culture? Do psychology students even know about those programmes? The media needs to help unearth things that are happening on the ground and are actually good.
But most reporting is either hollow self-care-oriented, or we have very bleak and despairing stories. Nuance is missing completely.
Could you talk about the unjust economics of global mental health you wrote about in your paper for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism?
This is important now more than ever in the context of what's happening to USAID and international development funding. When I wrote this paper a couple of years ago, this hell had not broken loose. But even then, it was clear that global aid funding in health care was highly paternalistic, and funders were determining agendas arbitrarily without really taking into account their ground partners’ feedback or needs. The disparity between high-income countries and low- and middle-income countries on almost every parameter, whether it is out-of-pocket expenses, number of psychiatric hospital beds, or psychiatric nurses, is obscene. How can you address mental health as a sector without reckoning with this? Because ultimately money is at the heart of everything. If you want to understand a sector, you really have to understand how money flows into that sector. Who does it come from? Where does it go? These are fundamental questions that I tried to address in my paper. I showed through my analysis that reporting on mental health after the pandemic had nearly tripled in English-language media globally and also in India. But what percentage of those stories were talking about money, funding, economics? Almost zero. And it was very interesting to me because during COVID, we were talking so much about vaccine hoarding by rich countries and all of the healthcare inequities between high - and low- income countries, but these themes were not seeping into mental health reporting.
What role does language play in shaping mental health narratives in India?
At a very meta level, the fact that mental health narratives are a very English pursuit, and the vocabulary of mental health is very anglicised. There are so many languages in the world where there is no exact word for depression, for instance. Communicating mental health issues to audiences in non-English languages has been a challenge.
But the media, of course, has the responsibility to learn and do better. And, this is most starkly felt in suicide reporting, where giving away people's personal details, jumping to always equate suicide with depression, the urge to medicalise a suicide is super harmful because it reduces a very complex socio-economic phenomenon into a simple psychiatric phenomenon, which it is not. Media has no excuse to not learn and do better.
Language is a function of privilege. Whose responsibility is it to train a reporter who has not had any exposure to these things, maybe doesn’t understand the politics of disability, the politics of language? The editor’s. But the editor doesn't have any incentive today to train reporters on any of this.
Given the huge gap in the education of journalists, what are some alternative ways for the media to learn about mental health storytelling?
I think lack of resources or awareness cannot be an excuse anymore. The question that needs to be asked is, why are mental health stories reported in a certain way? Is it really because of a lack of awareness or because if you sensationalise a story, it sells more? Obviously the answer is the latter. Now, when the incentive is so twisted, is awareness going to help? The media knows exactly what it is doing. But they do it anyway because the economics of the industry incentivises clicks. A few enlightened reporters and editors can't do much about it. Media owners have to take responsibility for fixing this. The disintegration of the media business is a direct result of audiences saying that you don't represent us. The crumbling of media giants and the rise of lived experience experts and content creators is happening because the mainstream media has systematically alienated its audiences.
Newsrooms are absolute cesspits of toxicity and burnout. Imagine the travesty of training these same newsrooms on mental health reporting? First, let the industry clean up its own house. Otherwise, it's a tick-box exercise.
A lot of former journalists now have started projects about making newsrooms mental health-friendly. Mar Cabra, the co-founder of Self Investigation, Jo Healy, founder of Trauma Reporting, and Hannah Storm, founder and co-director of the Headlines Network are a few.
How would you define good nuanced storytelling on mental health?
Depends on what specific area within mental health you are tackling. If you're writing a story on a breakthrough drug, for instance, you have to understand clinical trials, cost barriers, and if it is really going to make a difference to the masses. If you’re reporting on somebody's personal story, then just treating them as a human being, staying away from inspiration porn. As a reader, by the time I finish reading the story, I should feel at least a little empowered and not wonder: what do I do with this information? Otherwise, we are going to drown in despair.
What could be some underreported angles to consider in mental health storytelling?
If you just look at the finance or the economics aspect, there are hundreds of stories waiting to be written, in each area of underfunding or discrimination between high- income and low-income countries. There is also the mental health “revolution” on social media. We are still writing stories saying social media is bad for mental health. But a lot of other things are unfolding on social media. For instance, I've been writing about the fact that therapists are increasingly on social media and taking very public political views. What does that do to the supposed neutrality of that profession? I'm not asking this question judgmentally. I'm saying what does it do to a potential patient? When they see a therapist taking a certain view, how is the therapist-patient relationship changing? How is the business of therapy changing? Therapy is never seen as a legitimate discipline within healthcare, but an extension of social work. Many psychologists find it to be an unsustainable career. On the one hand, a lot of therapists are making bucket loads of money, but at the entry-level people are struggling to pay their bills.
Recommendations
Watch
The Fundamentals of Caring, an old Netflix original, is about the relationship between an 18-year-old foul-mouthed boy with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and his caregiver. Without any spoilers, I loved the part where the two set out to see a giant bovine placed on the second floor of a building with no lift. When the owner offers to replace the experience with a “free gift” for the boy, who is a wheelchair user, his caregiver pretends to call the local media guy. “He would come down with multiple cameras and ask you why you think it’s okay that somebody with disabilities isn’t allowed to see a giant cow, like everyone else,” he screams, and whoa, the boy is carried up with his wheelchair. It’s a sharp, funny moment that highlights how accessibility is often treated as an afterthought until someone calls it out. Even better is the reminder of the power the media holds in driving change through responsible coverage and representation.
Listen
Tanmoy recommends the audio-book version of The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. The book shows you how to unlock the power within yourself to become your best and truest self, change your future and find lasting happiness. Using the theories of Alfred Adler, one of the three giants of the 19th- century psychology alongside Freud and Jung, the authors explain how we are all free to determine our own future free of the shackles of past experiences, doubts and the expectations of others. It's a philosophy that's profoundly liberating, allowing us to develop the courage to change, and to ignore the limitations that we and those around us can place on ourselves.
Read
Tanmoy loves anything by the bestselling Swedish author Fredrik Backman. I personally recommend A Man Called Ove, the witty and heartwarming story of a grumpy old man.
Attend
PostCode - a first-of-its-kind forum for therapists navigating social media ethics and best practices, conducted by Tanmoy’s School of Sanity.
Streaming live from 10 am IST on April 12, 2025.
Learn
Person-Centered Healthcare: Assisting People With Communication and Non- Apparent Disabilities is a nine-course micro-training by the World Institute on Disability for healthcare professionals
The Neurodiversity at Work Playbook by Disability:IN is a useful resource for inclusion at the workplace.
Thanks for reading today’s issue! I look forward to your thoughts in the comments, by text or email. Find me on LinkedIn and Instagram if we’re not connected already!
Until next time.
Warmly,
Priti