Finally Getting
the Diagnosis
“I think I just took it for granted that since my dad is a therapist, my mental health wouldn't really be that much of a problem,” Prabha said.
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Prabha said that her father, Kumar, and her mother probably didn’t catch all the signs, and it’s possibly because her father saw being a therapist as a different role from being a father.
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“Or maybe he saw it and he was in denial,” she said, “I have no idea about that.”
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Prabha said Kumar had, however, been bringing up the idea of going and talking to someone if she ever needed help, but he never really insisted on it because she was reasonably functional in school. Depression never stopped Prabha from going to school or doing well in exams.
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“I didn't really have any academic pressure in school,” Prabha said. “So that should have been an indicator that I should probably go and get some help. Because like the thing that's supposed to stress me out isn't actually stressing me out. So what is causing this problem? But I never asked that question, and it didn't occur to anyone around me to ask that question either.”
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When Prabha got to college, she saw her peers getting involved in lots of extracurricular activities while Prabha was struggling to even get out of bed in the morning. She said she felt dysfunctional, lazy and unwilling to work, but she thought that that was just the way she was. She never thought it could be attributed to a psychological problem.
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Then social media came to the rescue.
Divya Prabha
Facebook fandom group
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Toward the end of 12th standard, Prabha joined a fandom group on Facebook that changed her life by bringing her a platform to discuss and learn about mental health.
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“I met so many new people who had such progressive takes on things and that was literally the first time in my life that I came across discourse about mental health,” Prabha said.
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She then started to read up more about depression and other mental health problems and talk to people in the fandom group who had problems like her, gathering other perspectives on it.
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She said that until then, Prabha was completely unaware of the fact that discourse even existed about such a thing.
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“So it was by completely random chance that I found out about this thing,” Prabha said, “and I luckily got into a group of acquaintances who made it a point to talk about things like this.”
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Deciding to go to the doctor
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Prabha was formally diagnosed in summer 2017.
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When she decided things were getting out of hand and she needed to get help, she took her dad along and the doctor told her that it was a very clear case. The doctor said they’ll start treating it aggressively and see where it goes.
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“But I realized, once I went to the doctors,” Prabha said, “I realized that I've been having it for a major part of my adolescent life. So like right from, say, 7th grade.”
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Because she had been having depression for so long, Prabha said that it was a little difficult focusing on a kind of treatment for her.
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But Prabha said identifying depression is just the beginning. There’s a lot of “emotionally taxing” work to put in after getting the diagnosis in order to get better.