Beginning in her late adolescence, Gayathri began to experience bouts of extreme anxiety and depression: “I could hardly eat, sleep or think straight. The only thing I could do was cry.” At the time, Gayathri was still living at home in Bangalore, India, in a traditional culture that had no concept of depression as an illness. Her parents insisted her agitation was all in her head.

The story she tells now as an advocate for mental health traces her thirty-year dual battle with depression and the associated stigma that constantly “tightened its noose around my neck.” As her story follows Gayathri into marriage, a move to the United States, and motherhood, there are many painful moments, such as when her husband discovers her in the backyard “clawing the earth furiously with my bare hands, intent on digging a grave so that I could bury myself alive.” Eventually, she is hospitalized and confined in the seclusion room of a psychiatric ward several times a week where she often felt “like a convict on death row.”

But Gayathri doesn’t end her story there. Read Gayathri’s story on the Story+Advocacy blog.