Screenwriter Shaheen Bhatt’s debut book ‘I’ve Never Been (un)Happier’ is a candid account of her 20-year-long struggle with depression and life in a famous filmi family. She spoke to Shobita Dhar about how writing helped her survive the dark times
Shobita Dhar (THE TIMES OF INDIA; January 12, 2020)

You make an interesting point in the book about how we have fetishised happiness. This often puts pressure on people to appear happy all the time and not pay attention to their sadness. Is that why people delay seeking help?
If we’re not happy all the time we’re programmed to automatically assume that there’s something wrong with us. No one wants to feel like they’re a broken thing that needs fixing, no one wants to feel like they’re weak so you delay getting help because even the idea of “getting help” has negative connotations. It suggests that you’re incapable. It suggests that you have somehow lost control. There’s also a general resistance built into us when it comes to talking about ‘negative’ or unpleasant feelings or things. As a result, we often don’t even know how to talk about anything remotely difficult.

The book includes many moving and terrifying pages from the diary you kept. Did writing help you through the dark days?
I’ve journalled since I was 12 years old, which is when depression first started for me. I had to do something with the overwhelming feelings I was experiencing, so I wrote about them. Writing has been one of the greatest tools for healing — it helped me process and expel every bad feeling I couldn’t make sense of. It helped me see patterns, it helped me understand myself better and it helped me get through it all.

You’ve been very candid — your dad’s addiction to first alcohol and then work, your own troubled relationship with food and alcohol, your insecurities when Alia found fame. Now that the book is out, do you regret your honesty even a teeny tiny bit?
Launching a book involves a lot of press and talking about yourself especially if you’ve written about yourself, and talking about myself is something that I’m not used to doing. It feels self-indulgent and self-involved to me. For me, the only time I regretted it was when I had to discuss myself in interviews and I was worried that the larger message (about mental health) was getting lost. Otherwise — nope, no regrets. I’ve never really been afraid of sharing because my entire family is one that shares — we’re honest and we value vulnerability.

The account of the demons you fought is very hard to read. How hard was it to for you to write this, and what made you decide to put your pain to paper?
It was definitely hard — I had to relive things I didn’t want to. I had to go back to dark places. It sent me back into a bit of a slump that I’ve only just about gotten out of. However, it was also incredibly rewarding. It taught me so much more about myself and it allowed me the chance for profound connection with a lot of people — in the end it’s been really good for me.

You have talked about how deeply affected you were by the deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. What was it that bothered you the most — the dissonance between their celebrity lives and their personal pain?
What bothered me the most was that these two, seemingly successful, middle-aged people were unable to shake the pain so far into their life. It was the fear that twenty years from now, I might still feel like this. You hope that by a certain age you will get better at least partially. It’s scary to think that you might not. It’s scary to think that there’s potentially another 30 or 40 more years of this in my future.

As a screenwriter, do you feel the way the Hindi movie industry portrays mental health needs to change?
To start with perhaps we need to tell more stories about mental health. It’s important also that we tell these stories with sensitivity and portray mental illnesses as accurately as we can. Caricaturing mental illness is dangerous because it spreads the wrong information and colour general perception. Movies are one of the best tools we have to spread messages world over and it’s always great when you can use that to good effect.

You have written about how depression affected all your relationships. Has the book helped your sister Alia and your parents understand you better?
Through my book my family has better understood the intricacies of what my mind is like on a bad day. It’s hard to let someone in when you’re in the throes of something because your focus is on just getting through it. This has helped them understand what is happening behind closed doors when I sometimes isolate myself. Through this book I’ve been able to let them into that part of my life in a much bigger way and I’ve been able to explain things to them that were hard for me to explain at one point. They’ve always understood me but through this book they saw what I’d been hiding.