Hope.

Today is World Mental Health Awareness Day.

A Taste of Rainbow, my second book which I wrote in the hope of inspiring others to be brave to seek help in times of depression and overcome stigma was originally supposed to be launched during World Mental Health Awareness week.

It is macabre almost, that instead, during this time, we lost a friend.

Grief soaked us for days. We weren’t close, but my fondest memory of you was when we didn’t know each other but I introduced myself to you 2 years ago when I overheard that you, too, attended the Coldplay concert. You didn’t look the sort. You were very studious, smiley always, the sort I thought would listen to Bach and Beethoven and not some emo-rock band with a lead singer who had a stringy frame and a voice dripping with molten liquid. I liked you immediately, because even though you didn’t know me, you asked if I wanted one of your plastic butterflies you picked up at the concert. It was like asking if a Beatles fan wanted Paul Mc Cartney’s cigarette.

Those plastic butterflies. Do you still remember them? When the roof exploded with a million psychedelic butterflies to one of my favorite songs, Lovers in Osaka and the crowd went wild. You were in the mosh pit, you had the best tickets- wasn’t that awesome? I went crazy. I was in the second tier, the butterflies were too far away. “Lovers, keep on the road you’re on, Runners, until the race is run, Soldiers, you’ve got to soldier on… Dreaming of the Osaka’s sun…”

I thought we would finish this race together. This journey we call medicine. No one knows how or why you left, but it made us realise, that many of us suffer in silence out of fear, shame and stigma. We are doctors-to-be, why can’t we treat ourselves. If I get help, I will be marked and it will be career suicide. How can I tell anyone? After all, I’m going to become a doctor.

Lies. All lies, the whole pack of them.

I couldn’t sit around doing nothing. So I rallied my juniors and classmates and said we had to do something. I organised a meeting. We met our deanery. I will organise another meeting this week to discuss with the various leaders our action plan. In the process of collating feedback, I received a flood of emails from people who were suffering, who had suffered, and who now want to make a difference.

We can make a difference. I don’t care what the skeptical group of people out there say about nothing ever coming to fruit when working with the deanery. I have worked with the team before, and they do care about us. The new team has already begun helping people. We need to help them help us.

To my juniors, I need you. I will be graduating soon. And if you want to make our so-called first world medical school a better place to grow in, come and join this cause. You’ve got the emails, you know what we need. Join us.

During our first meeting last week with the professors, I had just come from the meeting with my publisher, Singapore General Hospital, Singhealth and KTP Foundation. So I shared my story and the online version of Rainbow with everyone. My message was that there was nothing to be ashamed of, and there is hope after depression.

How can I bring this message to the public-at-large if my community doesn’t even believe in this? I cannot tell anyone, my career will be ruined. I won’t get the residency of my choice. I’m going to be a doctor, how can I get help? So my publisher and I are getting to work, to circulate an online version which is specific to address the needs of the medical community.

We work 36-hour shifts without sleep once or gasp, twice a week. We see death and suffering and injustice and pain too many times more than the normal person should. We work ourselves to the bone, competing with one another for specialties of our choice, making sacrifices towards a future which tells us we make less than a cashier at Mac Donald’s per hour as a junior house officer and we will become but yet another number in the workforce serving an endless line of wants and needs and aches and pains.

I really believe, every medical student goes through some sort of crisis of faith in his journey. Being a doctor is nothing like what people think it is.

But never have I wanted more to be a doctor than now. There is hope. When a patient told me, “Thank you doc,” and she thanked me most sincerely because I was most junior and looked after her most often, everything was worth it. I could curse the hours, but never my vocation.

There is hope. There is always hope. And my appeal to you is for you, my juniors especially, to realise we have feet of clay, too.

Getting help will probably be the best decision you made in your life. It will strengthen you and make you a better doctor than you ever thought possible. I know it changed my life, and God will use the most terrible of experiences for the good of others if we let Him.

We can make a difference. And it starts from you.

If you need help or know a friend who needs it, get it. After all, you’re going to become a doctor.

There is hope.