Understanding Mental Health Through the Lens of Cinema

Authored by Aditya Kripalani, Germany based award winning independent filmmaker and author.

Cinema has an extraordinary power to evoke emotions that words on a page simply can’t match. Unlike newspaper articles that rely on facts and figures to persuade, films connect with us on a deeper level, making us feel what characters feel. Just as an argument between two people calms down when emotions have been dealt with, so also convincing someone emotionally seemingly works better than trying to convince them with facts. Here cinema strikes gold. Taare Zameen Par is a great case in point. Everyone began to speak empathetically about Dyslexia after the film. Unfortunately, we’ve had very few films that have dealt with any mental health issue head on, post that. It’s dealt with as a general part of a character’s psychology, as we saw in Imtiaz Ali’s ‘Highway’, or ‘Dear Zindagi’. 

‘Three Of Us’ takes a bold approach to mental health, particularly in its portrayal of dementia. At times, the film’s pace and mood are designed to help us understand how a dementia patient experiences the world. It slows down the action, reflecting the way our busy, anxious lives can feel overwhelming. We get a sense of what it’s like to remember old moments while struggling to grasp new ones, allowing us to deeply connect with the characters’ emotions.

The Hindi film industry specifically, has shied away from films on Mental Health. Considering Suicide for example, India has lost nearly 400,000 people to suicide over 2020, 2021 and 2022. Post that magically, the clear figures aren’t available anywhere online. These available stats are also questionable. Probably they’re much higher because people in most towns in India, don’t put out the cause of death as suicide even if it is to protect themselves from having to answer questions to multiple circles of relatives about why the person committed suicide. And to avoid trouble from the police, who are also equally happy to just let the cases go and prevent extra paperwork and leg work. And yet we hardly have films dealing with suicide in India either, for a country that produces thousands and thousands of films over hundreds of dozens of languages every year. Films about mental health are also not welcome when writers or filmmakers approach producers as India is a filmmaking culture where selling popcorn at a theatre is almost as or sometimes more important than the tickets selling. Multiplex culture has made sure of that. Now one can’t imagine someone wanting to chomp on more popcorn while watching anything disturbing. And so, a culture of escapism has pervaded all filmmaking for a while now. 

OTT platforms a few years ago, when they came in, seemed to be ready to champion independently produced films which dealt with more disturbing material but soon after the beginning of the pandemic and the skyrocketing OTT viewership numbers, switched to star studded, safer, more popcorn friendly fare, thus leaving subjects of mental health again by the wayside. Even when we do deal with Mental Health in the popular wide-reaching domain, its one in a song like ‘Give me some sunshine give me some rain’ in ‘3 Idiots’, or in a comedic manner, as in ‘BhoolBhulaiyya’ and ‘Chhichhore.’ There is a marked fear of dealing with Mental Health head on. We’ve begun to deal with psychical disabilities in commercial cinema, or middle of the road cinema like ‘Margherita with a straw’, but very slowly, and as an offshoot of a physical condition, some mental health issues are dealt with but never fully or thoroughly. 

Mental health is dealt with, sometimes, in a fleeting manner or as a character’s reasoning for behaving a certain way through the movie, or just before a catharsis moment as in Highway or Dear Zindagi, but again, its shied away for most of the runtime of a film. It’s dealt with as part of the psychological motivation of a character’s behaviour. We get into it, in Bollywood, purely to explain away someone’s behaviour or as a dramatic reveal at the end of act two or in a pre-climax. That much we seem to have become at ease with; a footnote as such. However, we are still afraid to confront it.

In contrast, the movie “Not Today” presents a more unflinching examination of mental health, focusing on the lives affected by depression and anxiety. It provides a raw and authentic portrayal of the struggles individuals face, inviting audiences to engage with these issues in a meaningful way.

As India becomes the largest market for Facebook in the world, mental health is likely to emerge as a significant societal concern. Bollywood cannot ignore this for long, and there is hope that more films like Not Today will begin to address mental health issues with the depth and sensitivity they deserve.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and Adgully.com does not necessarily subscribe to it.