By Fizzah Jaffer
(YR.MEDIA) While many of us look back fondly on the fall of 2019 and the first few months of 2020 — the last moments of “normalcy” before the pandemic hit — I can only recall how much I dreaded each day of my sophomore year of college.
My first year hadn’t gone as I’d planned; my summer didn’t shine a light next to how productive my peers had been, and the mere thought of my class schedule turned my stomach into an everlasting pit of unease. I had always known my mental health to be subpar and that I was prone to anxiety, but it wasn’t until I was granted the opportunity for retrospection that I realized how badly I was struggling.
Matters were only made worse by the fact that I kept this all to myself, out of shame and fear. Though the logical part of me knew then, as I know now, that seeking support when you need it is nothing to be ashamed of, years of cultural conditioning had ingrained in me that mental health is not something to be spoken of publicly — let alone acknowledged as a weakness.
Being of Pakistani descent, I only ever hear difficulties discussed in hushed tones and mental treatment referred to as a joke, even amongst members of my own family. Expressions of unwellness are met with disbelief, ridicule, and even chastisement. Many of my fellow South Asian, Middle Eastern, and North African friends (Muslims and non-Muslims alike) have rehashed the stories of trying to explain their feelings of mental illnesses to their families and being told they are simply not praying enough or not following their religion correctly.
Despite the fact that many mental illnesses are inherited and that generational trauma is a massive hurdle for most of us, younger people from various cultural backgrounds are often made to believe by our loved ones that we are either exaggerating our pain or that we are doing something wrong, and mental health is scarcely acknowledged as something real.