Recently, actor Gulshan Devaiah took to social media to call out actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who tagged depression as an ‘urban concept’ in a recent interview. He tweeted that although he has immense respect for Siddiqui’s “craft”, he couldn’t take his statement about mental health seriously.

Talking to us, the Dahaad actor says, “My intention was not to criticize Nawaz bhai’s views. While I agree that a lot of people believe that the kind of pressures people living in an urban setup encounter are very different from the those experienced by people living in rural areas, we can’t generalize mental health issues. I am no expert on the matter. But what I can do is have a conversation around it and urge more people to come forward and talk about it (mental health).”

The 44-year-old is against assuming that mental health issues don’t exist among people living in rural areas. “I am not taking a dig at Nawaz’s views, but I do feel that we shouldn’t have blinders on while talking about an issue. Instead, we need to talk about it to simplify the concept [of mental health] so that people can understand it,” Devaiah ends.