Depression is not a personality trait that someone ‘cannot have’. It’s an illness with its of symptoms, challenges and manifestations. If you are not a clinician, you cannot provide a certificate for someone’s health whether it’s hypertension or depression or anything.

Media professionals, I am begging you to start including clinicians in your panels about discussions on mental health to help destigmatise and to stop misinformation. The whole persistence on ‘happy soul’ and ‘cannot be depressed’ is heavily damaging.

If you’re going to make a death by suicide into an investigative case,reflect + assess your ethics as journalists?If you’re going to parade the mental health status of the deceased into a ‘was he or was he not unwell?’,include professionals on these panels for healthy discussion.

This case has become a thirst for increasing TRPs and it continues to stigmatise mental illness in this country. Nobody except Sushant Singh’s doctors and clinicians can provide a certificate of health for him. Not his exes, his family, his fans or his friends and trainers.

Mental illness is deeply isolating and many suffer in silence for this reason - this barrage of unqualified expertise walking around and telling you ‘you’re supposed to be/you look happy and grateful’. If you want to discuss mental health on national media, bring in the experts.

Also thinking about the amount of risk these news channels are putting his staff, the ambulance driver, the trainer etc under. Their faces and identity exposed, making them more vulnerable to threats and harassment. For what? A trial by media that will get you viewership??

. @republic ‘journalists’ clarifying with statements like ‘normal logon ko jo hota hai waisa tha, kuch dimagi nahi tha!’ while talking to the staff in an interview is vile and shameless. This is worsening the mental health epidemic in this country by the day. I want to vomit.