Author Shyam Bhat
It’s Saturday evening and Antisocial, the collaborative workspace in south Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village, right above its throbbing counterpart, Social, looks inviting. As the evening progresses, one of its quarters slowly fills up with people. There is a sudden hush as a man in his forties walks in, holding a microphone, and begins a conversation on love. Is this a social, a mixer? “I am a psychiatrist,” Shyam Bhat, 43, announces to the room, “We tend to analyse everything, including love.”
Bhat, who shot to fame with the Deepika Padukone interview — about her struggle with depression on a prime time news channel over a year ago — knows a thing or two about love. “Like everyone else, I also went through a heartbreak, and it was one of the pivotal events in my life,” he says. The Bangalore-based mental health professional has recently released his book, How to Heal Your Broken Heart (Juggernaut). To the cynic, the title may evoke a smirk. But Bhat is not one to trifle with the whimsies of the heart.
Born in New Zealand, Bhat spent his formative years in Libya and graduated with an MBBS from Bangalore Medical College in 1996. In school, he’d loved humanities a little more than science, which led him to study philosophy. “By the time I finished Class XII, I decided that of all the fields I could pursue, psychiatry was one that would allow me the privilege of working with people,” he says. When he was 23, life dealt him a blow when he found that his girlfriend was cheating on him. “I was traumatised and sad, and it took me some time to recover. At that time, I had just started training in psychiatry in the UK. I started to look into why people hurt so much. To be effective as a psychiatrist, the first mind you transcend is your own,” he says. In 1999, Bhat moved to the US where he completed a five-year combined residency program in internal medicine and psychiatry at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine (SIU).
Ten years later, he’d quit his position as assistant professor in the medicine/psychiatry division at SIU and returned to India to join Manipal Hospital in Bangalore for the next six years. In 2010, he opened the Mind-Body clinic; two years later, he went live on radio, taking calls from people who sought help for depression, suicide and emotional negligence and abuse. “Initially, the radio show took time to take off, but soon we had callers who spoke different languages, and were not necessarily from urban centres. Sixty per cent of the questions were variants of heartbreak,” he says. “One of the things that I learned was that people are scared of going to a psychiatrist but they are willing to talk as long as they are anonymous and their identities confidential. It is a misconception that India is not interested in discussing psychological issues. Maybe, they didn’t have a platform or an opportunity before,” he says.
At Antisocial, Bhat is confronted with questions about love, loss, heartbreak and recovery. A man in the audience tells him how he tried to get over his ex-girlfriend by joining yoga and meditation. “I don’t want to feel anything,” he says. “Maybe that is the problem,” Bhat responds. Later on, the psychiatrist reveals why he wants to reach out to more people in India. “Fifty per cent of our population has the depression gene. In America, presently, the depression gene is 20 per cent of the population. Yet, they are more depressed than us, because they follow an unhealthy lifestyle. Today, we follow that lifestyle and we have the depression gene more than them,” he says.
A regular at educational institutions and TEDx events, Bhat lists what is killing us slowly, but surely — diet, lack of exercise, lack of exposure to sunlight, among others. But aspiration, he says, is the leading cause. “Wanting more and more, being defined by the things that you own, being isolated and wanting privacy to such an extent that you don’t have much intimacy with people anymore, is harming us,” he says.
In search of a solution, Bhat has looked east, especially to Vedanta, the Upanishads, the Gita and Buddhism. “I don’t think you can practice psychiatry without being a philosopher. Western philosophy, as compared to the eastern one, is very primitive. It doesn’t transfer from human to cosmic, to the universal,” he says. Bhat’s study of both the schools led him to construct his own psychotherapeutic method called the “integral self therapy”, which combines the practice of meditation, Vedanta philosophy along with existential therapies such as yoga, ayurveda. “All of these form my approach — mind, brain, body and the spirit. I see any disease and condition as an imbalance of all these factors,” he says. The “approach” is also shaping up into his next book.
As a practitioner in a country with a handful of therapists for thousands of patients, Bhat says there is a lot to be done. The first step towards it is to accept the field without any stigma. “Most people think psychiatry means some guy sitting in some pagal khana. I think there is a flaw in our medical system, especially in the field of mental health. First, people don’t know if you must go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, for one. The difference is that a psychologist hasn’t done an MBBS, so they don’t know the diagnosis. Psychiatry is more and more only interested in the brain as a disease model. Secondly, and I think that many are doing this already, psychiatrists should be accessible, less technical.”
Since the Padukone interview, however, Bhat has witnessed a greater participation to talk about mental health in the public sphere. “Has India accepted this problem? No, we are not there yet. But Deepika’s interview made a huge change. The media is talking more about mental health issues, people are more open to it,” he says. Bhat is also a trustee at the actor’s Live Love Laugh Foundation in Bangalore.
Perhaps, it is time, then, that has brought forth his book, an accessible narrative that answers the questions that he has heard too many times in his lifetime. Romance, he says, is dying, and at a great cost. “Since when did becoming an adult mean you are cynical about love? Millions of people are walking around, wounded in their hearts,” he says.
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