Alum Educates on Intersection of Identity and Mental Illness.
Alum Educates on Intersection of Identity and Mental Illness
Sukhmani Bal shares her experiences navigating the mental healthcare system through a series of autobiographical essays to combat stigma and advocate for culturally competent care.
Navigating the mental health care system can be difficult and overwhelming for patients. But when mental illness and culture intersect, finding appropriate, culturally competent care can become even more taxing.
School of Public alum Sukhmani Bal (SPH’20) knows this experience all too well. A Punjabi woman with bipolar disorder, Bal says she spent years misdiagnosed and it wasn’t until she had an Indian doctor who looked like her and her family that her family consented to care, her concerns were listened to, and she was on a path to receive the care she needed.
Now, Bal, the director of community outreach at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Cross-Cultural Student Emotional Wellness, presents about the intersection of her experiences as a woman, a person of color, and a person with a serious mental illness through a series of autobiographical essays. She has presented over 20 times so far, speaking with a range of audiences, from small religious organizations to medical schools. Most recently, Bal presented at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) National Convention in July 2021.
“Throughout my time in the mental healthcare system, I have felt there was a huge gap between my culture and the way I navigated the world and how the clinicians I was interacting with perceived me to be,” says Bal. “Mental illness does not discriminate, though, and there comes a point when things like mania, depression, and psychosis present really similarly, regardless of one’s cultural background.
“My presentation really gets at this idea of racial and ethnic minorities feeling the need to sanitize themselves when in traditionally white spaces. In my experience, I have found myself leaving pieces of myself out of conversations with my clinicians and therapists simply because I believed that they wouldn’t understand them.”
Bal’s presentation also focuses on a lack of advocacy and understanding around mental health and mental illness, specifically among Asian and South Asian populations, which often creates a significant barrier to seeking and receiving care. She is the first Punjabi woman in the United States to talk about bipolar disorder at this large of a stage, which she says is incredibly problematic given the knowledge that Asians experience depressive symptoms and suicidality at higher rates than their white counterparts.
“This is a crisis that we are not addressing, and I think it is due in large part to the fact that the Asian community is really concerned about saving face,” she says. “There is an unspoken need to preserve a sort of status in this community, so when we talk about mental health issues, they’re often perceived as detriments to one’s self and this status. This stigmatizes these issues and leaves people closed off to the idea of having more open conversations about mental health and their experiences with it.”
However, Bal believes that sharing stories is a way to combat this stigma and challenge the biomedical model that often pathologizes the human experience, which is exactly what she hopes to achieve by sharing her own story with others.
“Stories often show that we are more alike than different, so I hope that by sharing my experiences, I am able to show people that having a mental illness is a human experience,” she says. “I also hope my story helps providers and caregivers better understand their patients’ lived experiences, and that I can be a voice for my community so they can feel seen, heard, and advocated for in a medical space.”
After nearly 15 years as a patient in the mental healthcare system, Bal says that she can see that diversity and cultural competency are being prioritized more than ever before. She has even seen these changes reflected in her own care team, which she says has had a significant impact on her path to healing. Although there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure representation in the field, she says that the changes she has seen over time make her hopeful for the future.
“Curiosity and compassion can go really far in this work,” she says. “Providers with a genuine curiosity for culture and peoples’ experiences bring a lot to the table, and when people are compassionate and can empathize with their patients as people rather than just as patients, they get a lot further than they would otherwise.”