Are Indian cricketers keeping their mental health issues secret?
According to the World Health Organisation, right now 56 million Indians are suffering from depression. A further 38 million Indians suffer from anxiety disorders. But, it seems, no Indian cricketer is among them. Not one. Zero. And yet, as we head across the cricketing globe, more and more players from other countries are emerging as having suffered mental health issues.
So are we to assume Indian cricketers reside in a psychological enclave untouched by a condition which affects every other nation in the modern world? Or is there something else at play here? Could it be the stigma that surrounds mental health, banished in most sporting dressing rooms, still exists in India? Indeed, in Indian society as a whole? Otherwise, how do we explain these figures?
Jules Evans is an academic at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions in the UK. “My tentative initial answer,” she says, “is that India is a country obsessed with status and hierarchy. Mental illness is still seen as a terrible blot on one’s status, and therefore a risk to one’s career advancement, one’s marriage prospects, one’s place on the social scale, and above all to your family’s social prospects.
“This is the paradox,” she adds, “that a culture with such a huge focus on health, well-being and spiritual wisdom should see mental illness as so taboo.”
The UK is in no position to scratch its head in wonder at this situation. It is only in recent times it has itself thrown off the shackles of stigma, a discussion that has been given added gravitas and prominence by a number of cases involving high profile sports stars, not just cricketers, but footballers.
The country was plunged into shock when one of its best-known footballers, Gary Speed, took his own life after being afflicted by depression. The sight of sports people talking about their mental health has normalised the issue in the UK. Not only that but sporting bodies such as the Professional Cricketers’ Association have brought in players who have suffered to help the next generation understand the importance of recognising symptoms and accessing help.
Even club players have an outlet via Opening Up, a project set up following the death of Sefton Park CC wicketkeeper Alex Miller by teammates wanting to start conversations about mental health to prevent further instances of suicide. While mental health services in the UK are far from ideal, often accused of being under-funded and not easy to access, even this is in stark contrast to India where, despite an estimate that between 130m and 150m people are suffering from a mental illness, including depression, the nation has just 0.3 psychiatrists per 100,000, one of the lowest figures in the world. Those that do exist are concentrated in the major cities.
According to the National Mental Health Survey carried out by the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, in Bengaluru, only one in five Indians who need mental health care services are receiving them. This means 120m people are missing out.
The survey also reveals that common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety afflict one in 10 Indians. Statistically, one person in every cricket team in India will be harbouring a mental condition. It is hard to believe that somehow that isn’t the case. That India’s cricketers live in a bubble protected from stress or strain, that their brains have developed in a different way. It is simply impossible to countenance such a situation.
However, former India paceman Javagal Srinath has claimed words like ‘depression’ aren’t really heard in Indian cricketing circles. Slow left-armer Murali Kartik, meanwhile, who played in England with Somerset and Surrey, has even put English cricketers’ depression down to the weather. “The weather is quite gloomy there even in summer,” he reports. “I cannot think of any other reason.”
But there is a difference between feeling a bit fed-up about the weather and actually being depressed. Perhaps the real reasons an Indian cricketer may not own up to being depressed are rather more deep-seated, as evidenced by the aforementioned Jules Evans’ experience at a mental health conference in West Bengal.
“The speaker asked for anyone in the audience who’d ever had mental illness or been on psychiatric drugs to raise their hands,” recalls Evans. “For a few seconds, no-one did. And then about 15 of us did, in a room of around 100."
“It felt strange to me, raising my hand, in a way I’m not sure it would anymore in the UK – it felt like I was risking my status, pushing against a wall of shame and secrecy. In fact, I only raised my hand because the lady next to me did first.”
The speaker that day was Ratnaboli Ray. One of India’s leading mental health campaigners, she believes little will change regards mental health until India recognises the need to grasp the modern world.
“Mental health is at a very nascent stage in India,” she states. “We are trying to establish an interconnection between mental health and other developmental issues. For example, sexuality, gender, livelihood, all have to be looked at through mental health lens otherwise there is a chance of these programs crumbling down.”
In the meantime, the conversation about cricket and depression continues to be either half-hearted or muted. Sports psychologist BP Bam suggests depression can be battled with yoga. Certainly, one imagines it can help. But there are plenty in England and elsewhere who would suggest that mental health issues run a whole lot deeper.
John Woodhouse TV critic, @Sentinel writer, penned biggest selling cricket book of 2016 with @gfoxyfowler, now working with Steve Harmison. @BBCRadioStoke and @BBCRadioManc