The actress explains how she has turned her experiences into an educational tool.
Six years ago, Deepika Padukone was overcome by an unshakeable feeling of emptiness; no matter how much she fought against it, she was spiralling into despair. “I was constantly trying to figure out why,” she tells Bazaar now. “Why did that happen? Why was it that so few people could understand what I was going through? Why was it that I wasn’t able to explain it to them? When I reflected upon my own experience, it made me realise how much stigma there is and how ill-informed we are about mental illness.”
Following her ensuing clinical depression diagnosis, Padukone resolved to use her platform as one of India’s highest paid and most recognisable actresses to address this taboo. In 2015, she appeared on television with her therapist in an effort to overturn her compatriots’ deep-rooted misconceptions about mental health. She begins, “I think my interview was a conversation starter. I would like to attribute the Indian media’s increased awareness of mental-health struggles to when I came out with my story. Even if just one person who saw it identified with my symptoms, I wanted them to understand what was going on. I didn’t want anyone to go through the suffering that I did of not knowing what was happening to me. There’s this assumption that people with severe mental illness are ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’. Until people understand what mental health is and why it happens, automatically the stigmatisation process will continue.”
Since then, Padukone has broadened her scope as a mental-health ambassador, setting up the Live Love Laugh foundation to continue this dialogue about depression and anxiety. (She even goes so far as to sell items from her enviably stylish wardrobe as a means of fund-raising for the organisation.)
“I wanted to create an impact at a large level,” she explains. “There’s been a revolution in terms of physical health in the last 10 years but – at least in India – we aren’t necessarily aware of our mental health.” The 2020 objectives of her not-for-profit are to destigmatise mental illness and raise awareness but, by her own admission, she certainly has her work cut out for her.
“We’re basically trying to wake up an entire nation and educate every single person,” she says.
As well as looking after the Indian public’s mental health, Padukone has learnt to prioritise her own self-care – although there are no hard-and-fast rules she abides by. “It’s a varied concept, to be honest,” she reveals. “It’s something that I have to work on and be conscious of on a daily basis. It’s not like a fever when you have it and then take medication and it’s done. My GP has prescribed certain lifestyle changes so that I don’t go down that dark space again.”
Another avenue through which Padukone is exploring her activism is cinema. She has starred in nearly 30 Bollywood movies, demonstrating her range by portraying an eclectic roster of characters, “from bubbly party girls to beautiful queens to grieving widows”. Her latest movie Chhapaak (meaning ‘splash’ in Hindi) is a biopic centred on the real-life acid-attack survivor Laxmi Agarwal (played by Padukone).
The actress has received glowing notices for her work in the movie, with Variety singling out her “straight-from-the-heart conviction [that] gives her multifaceted performance the solid ring of truth”. “This has been the most challenging film of my career,” she admits. Chhapaak is also her first film as a producer. “I came onboard as an actor initially, but then I felt I wanted to contribute more in a creative capacity beyond performing,” she explains. “My director was open to the idea and we went from there, working to tell the story with delicacy and honesty.”
With her inspirational attitude both on and off camera, it’s no surprise that Padukone was named one of Time’s most influential people in 2018 and has amassed 26.7 million devotees on Twitter, making her the most followed Asian woman on the site. Through her films and her foundation, Padukone has shown that she truly is a taboo-busting role model, tirelessly striving to present the truth.
– Courtesy: Harpers Bazaar UK
