Sandeep Maheshwari’s depression: A Bhagavad-gita perspective on mental health

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
The well-known motivational speaker, Sandeep Maheshwari, recently mentioned that he has been taking treatment for depression for quite some time. This has created surprise and even shock for some people because he was seen as a very powerful, motivating speaker. And that somebody who was giving motivation to others was lacking motivation himself to the point of being depressed.
It can seem quite disruptive to some people at least. So, what would be the Bhagavata’s perspective on this? I’ll talk about it in three broad parts in terms of three misconceptions about what the mind and mental health is. The Bhagavata explains that our existence is at three levels.
Physical, mental and spiritual. Body, mind and soul. And this means that each of these is a distinct layer of existence in itself.
Just as physical health and physical harm, physical illness is not just a matter of, say, lack of willpower or lack of strength. If somebody has a fracture, then we can’t just expect them to by sheer willpower start walking normally or start lifting weights. Similarly, the mind is an entity in itself and the mind can also get wounded.
It can get wounded by life’s reversals. It can get wounded by traumas that somebody might have experienced in the past. So, to stigmatize mental health problems by deeming them as a person simply lacking willpower or lacking strength or lacking moral clarity or something like that is to not only be reductionistic about the problem but is also to misunderstand and misrepresent the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita on this issue.
The mind is a real thing in itself and it can have real wounds within it. Now, the first misconception is to think that this is just something imaginary or something due to weakness and to stigmatize it. The other problem problematic approach according to the Bhagavad Gita is to reduce the mind to the body and the most common way it is done is to reduce the mind nowadays to the brain and then this is to treat all mental health problems simply as problems of either brain structure or brain chemistry.
Now, sometimes damage to the brain structure or imbalance in brain chemistry can cause some behavioral and psychological problems but the brain is different from the mind. The brain is a part of the physical body. It’s an organ within the gross physical body whereas the mind is subtle.
If you consider these three levels to be like the hardware, software and user the brain is like the CPU. It’s a part of the hardware whereas the mind is like the software. So the tendency in some areas of modern science to consider all mental health problems to be simply neurological or neurochemical problems and to pathologize them and treat them with chemicals that is also detrimental that can lead to people getting addicted to harmful chemicals and that may also lead to people feeling worse because the dependence on those chemicals prevents them from actually having a holistic approach to addressing mental health problems and the third problem so it’s not just a problem of strength.
It’s not a problem that can be fixed only by chemicals. The third is to think that all mental health problems equate the mind with the soul. This can happen within spiritual traditions where people start thinking that all mental health problems can be solved solely by spiritual methods.
Certainly spirituality addresses our deepest need for meaning and purpose in life. It gives us a bigger picture of who we are and what we are meant to live for and the Bhagavad Gita offers this wisdom to Arjuna when he suffered a mental breakdown and that Bhagavad Gita’s wisdom can empower all of us. At the same time, the Bhagavad Gita is also clear that soul is not the same as the mind and even spiritual people can sometimes suffer from deep emotional wounds and when the mind is wounded they may need to address it appropriately.
So a multi-pronged approach whereby one addresses various aspects of life by which the spiritual methods are included if required. A person has relationships where a person can share their heart’s wounds and have those wounds addressed and if required in exceptional or extreme cases neurological neurochemical intervention is also required but we offer our best wishes and prayers to Maheshwari for recovering and continuing on whatever service he is doing to humanity and for anyone else who has mental health problems we pray that they get the resources for addressing those. So to summarize that the mind is not just a matter of willpower and not just a problem of imagination.
Mind is not the brain and all mental health problems cannot be solved by just taking some chemicals and the mind is not the soul. So it is not that spiritualists are immune to mental health problems. A multi-pronged approach where a person looks for deeper meaning and purpose in life a person looks for deeper connections whereby a person through relationships through revealing and sharing one’s heart can heal from previous wounds and where if necessary medical methods are also used and in a holistic way help people to address their mental health issues.
Thank you. Hare Krishna.