There are feelings that we know how to describe, say, a broken arm, a fever, or a headache. But what about the hurt that words cannot express? For many experiences of mental distress, the answer is often reduced to a handful of familiar vocabulary: worry, pain, stress. What gets lost in translation is everything that makes a person’s experience distinctly their own — the language they think in, the culture they inhabit, the memories they carry, and the words they may not yet have.
This question of language, ownership, and the ethics of telling another person’s story took centre stage on Saturday. The Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health (BALM), The Banyan, and Aaldamara Foundation instituted the Dr Parasuraman Lived Experience Writing Award, in memory of the former Director of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS).
Instituted to honour Parasuraman’s commitment to “equity, eliminating deprivation, and centring narratives from the margins”, the award seeks to move mental health writing away from stories told solely by observers. “We are instituting this in the hope that the gaze is not always on the outside when writing about madness — where the mad are spoken for, classified, filed away, or reduced to metaphors of a ‘dark gift’ or the ‘costly price of genius,” said Lakshmi Narasimhan, co-CEO of BALM. The award was an attempt to let those who have lived through such experiences to “actually write about it”. The award also seeks to widen the kinds of stories that enter conversations around mental health.
Interacting with CE, Lakshmi said, “This is an attempt to bring to the centre those diverse stories — stories in different languages, from different experiences, and perhaps not as mainstream as one would expect. They don’t necessarily need to have neat arcs of suffering and recovery. They can be about love, how people navigated their purpose in life, because many have fuller lives beyond this whole idea of recovery in mental health.”
Two writers will be recognised each year. This year, with an internal selection process, the award went to Sasisekar Menon, who is set to retire as chief librarian of the Kerala High Court after more than three decades of service, and Sunitha Shirly, writer and social entrepreneur.
For Sasisekar, who lives with schizophrenia and Parkinson’s, his forthcoming autobiography, slated for release in 2027, traces a life in which institutional structures, family relationships, and support systems have shaped his journey. Sasisekar used the occasion to acknowledge those who had helped him along the way. His wife, Sree Geetha, he said, “has been a real backbone for my recovery for the last 20 years”, alongside his parents-in-law, a close friend and former colleague. His autobiography, he said, will explore how his birth family struggled to understand him, while the family he married into became a source of support.
Sunitha’s book, Thangassery Pen, meanwhile, takes the readers back to her childhood in Thangassery, a place she remembers as an overwhelmingly Anglo-Indian community with a distinct culture. An incident involving her as a child had made headlines in newspapers in 1996. Decades later, she returned to the episode through a book.
Though her other books, including novels, short stories, essays, and children’s writing, are in Tamil, this work was written in English. “My adoptive parents were Anglo-Indians based in Australia and elsewhere, and taking upon the suggestion of their daughters, I wanted to document life in Thangassery and their heritage in English, a language better understood by people I grew up with.”
For Sunitha, writing about lived experience is ultimately about making private struggles useful to someone else. “When someone writes about their struggles and cries, there are so many things in it, and not everyone can write it the same way,” she said. Putting such experiences into a book, she added, allows the experiences to reach the public “so that someone benefits from it, and they get awareness”.
Where’s the vocabulary?
The conversation around writing, however, did not end with the awards. A panel discussion brought together writers, translators, and storytellers to examine what happens when experiences from the margins are turned into narratives for public consumption and what can be lost along the way. Prabha Sridevan, former Justice of the Madras High Court, writer, and translator; Shoba Thomas, corporate communications veteran and former journalist; Aparna Karthikeyan, writer and independent journalist; and Lalita Iyer, writer and independent journalist, were the panellists.
For Prabha, storytelling offers a way of seeing realities that one may otherwise remain outside of. She described translating a story involving a woman grappling with an affair, self-loathing, motherhood, and thoughts of suicide. “Translating that was difficult. It was not my experience. It was somebody’s experience that I was translating,” she added.
The question of vocabulary also surfaced in the discussion around reporting from rural Tamil Nadu. Aparna said conversations around mental health often rely on words such as ‘kavalai’ and ‘kashtam’ (worry and pain), regardless of the complexity of the experience underneath.
“The range of vocabulary is not rich enough for us to describe it, and I think this is intentional,” she said, arguing that people often seek to make mental trauma invisible rather than discussing it.
For storytellers working across languages, the challenge is not only whether a word has an equivalent, but whether the cultural weight behind it survives the journey. Prabha notes, “Everything means something different somewhere.” She added that even expressions or words that carry particular force in Tamil can change when rendered in English.
As the evening repeatedly returned to relationships, work, love, family, resilience, loss, or simply the ordinary business of living, sometimes the first step towards understanding any of them is finding the vocabulary to tell the readers.