Exploring Depictions of Mental Health in Popular Hindi-Urdu Cinema

Hindi-Urdu popular cinema, commonly referred to as Bollywood, largely reflects the evolution of various social attitudes in the Indian subcontinent. In order to better understand these films’ depiction of social attitudes surrounding mental illness and the implications for its treatment, this study creates and analyzes an anthology of Hindi-Urdu movies from the 1940’s to the present that portray some aspect of mental illness. These movies that depict mental illness were grouped into the various aspects of stigma that they portrayed: structural stigma, courtesy stigma, health practitioner stigma, self-stigma, and public stigma. I extracted and analyzed the attitudes towards mental illness, perceived cause of mental illness, types of stigmas related to mental illness, depiction of mental illness and, if applicable, the treatment methods portrayed. This study aimed to answer the following questions: how have films contributed to explanations of the stigma related to mental illnesses? What are the perceived causes of mental illness in Indian cinema and what implications does this depiction have on the current help-seeking behaviors of the South Asian community?