Succeeding With Bipolarity: Aparna Piramal Raje’s Awe-Inspiring Account

I’ve always enjoyed Aparna Piramal Raje’s pieces in  The Mint, her profiles of business icons like Rahul Bajaj, or her vivid narratives about workspaces, buildings and cities. While reading her latest book,  Chemical Kichdi, where she turns her writerly lens on her own life, my admiration for Aparna has only intensified. She has, at many points in her life, been a multitasker of the sort that Allison Pearson captured with comic clarity in her 2002 novel,  I Don’t Know How She Does It.  Aparna has been a business leader, a writer, a philanthropist, a community organizer, a wife, a mother of two kids – all this while contending with bipolarity.

In his foreword to Aparna’s book, Anand Mahindra dwells on how the author’s life might seem invulnerable from the outside. To begin with, she garnered degrees from the elite Oxford University and Harvard Business School. Her career has been equally impressive: penning articles for papers like  The Mint  and the UK’s  Financial Times Weekend, spearheading a furniture business, and authoring books. As Aparna puts it and more incredibly demonstrates, “you can be happy, successful and bipolar.”

Chemical Khichdi, her third book after  Working Out of The Box: 40 Stories of Leading CEOs  and the co-authored  Business Mantras, has been motivated by an altruistic concern to educate and inspire communities, families and individuals who have faced mental health conditions. And also to sensitize policymakers, business leaders and employers of all stripes to the needs of employees who require occasional breaks or in-house counselors.

Penning a candid account of what her illness feels like from the inside, Aparna details therapies that can work for others, based on her own experiences. Moreover, she is acutely attuned, as the daughter of Dilip and Gita Piramal, that she was born into financial and cultural privilege. Conscious of how others in the country may lack the resources she can access, she suggests solutions that are tailored for diverse contexts. Therapies she recommends are broadly labeled as Medical, Love, Empathy, Self, Work, Spiritual and Lifestyle.

Aparna’s Life Story

Growing up in Mumbai, Aparna attended the J.B. Petit High School for Girls. She then finished her three-year undergraduate degree at Oxford without any signs of what was to come. When she left Oxford, she observed herself talking a lot, and not sleeping. She did not see it then as a potender of something else.

The eventual breakdown was to come just before she entered Harvard Business School in 2000.

At an internship at Hyderabad, she was stressed about the dissolution of her parents’ marriage. And about a personal breakup she had suffered. She was also incredibly excited about her impending arrival at Harvard. Her brain was besieged by myriad thoughts and plans – eager like any young person to positively change the world – but also too stimulated to be functionally coherent.

All along, Aparna felt she was doing all right, but her sister Radhika sensed something different, and unsettling. Aparna made it to the Harvard campus. After classes started, and while peers settled into the frenetic life of a business student, she fell into bouts of crying. Of lying in bed and listening to Sting’s  Ghost Story  on repeat: “What did not kill me just made me tougher.” (Of course, that line, as Aparna wryly notes, has become fraught for a reason.) But soon she was drawn out by the chirpy friends around her and the spectacular New England colours.

When she came home for the summer, she was agitated again, because she did not receive a job offer after her internship. At a beach retreat, she stopped sleeping and wandered about, muttering to herself. On her return to Harvard, the melancholy accompanied her – pressing on her every now and then. At one point, she was almost tempted to slit her wrists but turned to reading Mohsin Hamid’s  Moth Smoke  instead. Eventually, the depression wore off and she finished her classes, graduating with the others.

Marriage and Parenting

Amit Raje, whom she met in 2003, emerged from a starkly different socioeconomic background. His father was a shop floor supervisor and his mother a telephone operator-turned-homemaker. He told Aparna that his entire home would fit into her living room. She wondered how she would break the news of their romance to her family; but, like Aparna, he was also imaginative, literary, ambitious and brilliant, having recently been admitted into the London Business School.

They were married in June 2005, with Aparna wholeheartedly relishing the run-up to the wedding – the  mehendi, the  sangeet, the gala Indian do with many of her international friends. Their next three years in London were like a prolonged honeymoon. Aparna worked at an advertising agency in London, while Amit studied at the London Business School.

In Feb 2008, she gave birth to her son Amartya in Mumbai. Soon after she was struck by something worse than postpartum depression. She was assaulted by violent images. Despite this, the ever-resilient Aparna nursed her infant. Moreover, baby Amartya seemed to intuit that his mother needed patience and compassion. In the meanwhile, her freelance writing career gained solid ground. Her first article was published in  The Mint  and then another in the UK’s  Financial Times Weekend. In 2010, her second child, Agastya was born.

A Rollercoaster Phase

In 2012, she helped with turning around a family business. But eventually, the stress spiraled to an untenable level. Maybe she was doing too much – writing articles, mothering two kids, and running the business. She started sensing the mania returning – sleeplessness, euphoria and then darker, violent thoughts. On a trip to an ashram in Bihar, she experienced an intense manic episode. “When there is an orchestral universe inside my head, it is hard not to pay full attention to its grandeur. This is mania.”

There were other moments when she contemplated suicide. Once she walked up to a terrace, intending to jump off the building. “It is not that I was ready to abandon my family. It was just that my self-esteem was so low during those months that I honestly didn’t think it would make a big difference to anyone in the long run if I wasn’t around anymore.”

By the end of 2013, she started feeling better. She did really well managing multiple projects that included a house move till Nov 2014. Then from Nov 2014 to March 2018, she often had to contend with “tackling manic or hypomanic episodes followed by weeks of lows.”

In March 2016, she was going through a manic episode – after a few weeks of poor sleep. An antipsychotic drug also caused restlessness as a side effect – she could not sit more than nine minutes at a time during that period. Once she was struck with such relentless edginess, that she could not finish a meal. Fortunately, the doctor treated her with an antihistamine and changed the drug to a milder one.

From 1 Jan 2016 till 10 March 2016, “my medications were altered ten times by three medical practitioners.” Other side effects of pills included thyroid disease, migraine and obesity.

In August 2016, she wrote this short note to herself: “Am really beginning to wonder if I’m forever doomed to these up and down cycles. How do I unlock myself from what can seem to be a prison of pendulums?” Even on weekends filled with a host of social activities – kids’ birthdays, Ganapati puja celebrations, other family functions – she could sense her spirits dipping.

A Remarkable Buoyancy

In sum, for the past 20 years, she’s had a dozen manic episodes, “interspersed with some periods of depression” and many months of normalcy in-between. Even on normal days, she does notice minor shifts in mood. Bipolarity is defined as oscillations between hyper or manic moods and plunging lows. Energy levels surge on the one hand and dip alarmingly on the other.

As Aparna notes, with the kind of precision and expressiveness deployed by William Styron in  Darkness Visible : “Mania makes me lose sight of the mundane. I lose track of which sets of clothes I’ve worn and which I haven’t, grabbing what is closest to my hand every morning. I can’t recall bathing much. Directions are impossible.”

Amit also brings a new insight into relationships: “I strongly believe that a strong relationship is one when you still like the person when you are actually struggling to like the person.” Her in-laws, who have been living with her, have also been pillars of support. Her mother, her sister Radhika and her husband Amit have been her primary caretakers. 

Overall, it took her over a decade to get her condition diagnosed, to accept the need for drugs and to find the right doctors or team to advise her. Such a long journey, she says, is typical for many patients with psychiatric conditions. According to the  Lancet  Psychiatry journal, about 197.3 million people in India suffer from mental health issues.

Voices like Aparna’s and her lyrical, compassionately documented journey can help turn the situation around for many. As Shekhar Saxena, Professor of Global Mental Health at Harvard notes: “It takes enormous courage to write about one’s own mental health problems and it takes enormous storytelling skills to do it well. Aparna Piramal Raje has shown both of these in her book,  Chemical Khichdi.”

In an age beset with other concerns – climate change, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, school shootouts – let us also heed battles being fought inside minds.

References:

Aparna Piramal Raje, Chemical Khichdi: How I Hacked My Mental Health,  Ebury Press, Penguin Random House, India 2022