Healing Live: A Roma tribe's response to a mental breakdown

A glimpse into how the Romani navigate mental health depths.

Mainstream society has been making big strides when it comes to mental health. We have started to speak up. We have started to seek help. We have started to raise awareness and break down the stigma.

And here’s the crux. The stigma.

Martina suffered from depression for many years. When she started seeing a therapist in 2015 and told her then-closest person about it, she experienced one of the worst fights in her life. She was judged, called pathetic, and blamed for bringing down the “mood.” One of Martina’s biggest regrets is opening up to this person about her mental health struggles. Most people in Martina’s shoes have this exact experience when they lift the curtain and share what’s happening in their souls.

People hide what they’re going through if what they are going through is internal. Unless you can see and touch it, it will be ridiculed, downplayed, denied, twisted, and reframed, but rarely acknowledged. The societies we’ve built are ones of judgment, pretense, and putting up a front.

So, one of the biggest revolutions happening in the last years is mental health awareness. Encouraging people to speak up. Encouraging people to seek help. Encouraging people to listen, to acknowledge and support their loved ones.

But that’s mainstream culture. Highly civilized, polished, educated, and advanced mainstream culture.

Let’s see how mental health is handled in a culture described by outsiders as backward, savage, and illiterate: Romani culture.

One evening in April 2023, we were lying in bed and scrolling on our phones, when Pepi saw one of his nephews going live on Facebook.

The nephew, Svetlin, was sobbing.

“Brothers, sisters,” he said to the camera, “please pray for me. I have fear in my heart. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. A fear has seized me.”

Svetlin didn’t use phrases like “anxiety attack” or “spiraling” or any other of the terms we have to describe bad episodes. He didn’t try to translate or soften his experience, nor make it funny, so it will be received. He didn’t look for “the right words.” He used the words that came to him.

And he didn’t hide. He did the exact opposite - he went live on social media, in tears, and told people how he felt.

Martina’s heart sank when she saw this video on Pepi’s phone. Her immediate thought was “No, don’t do that, they’ll tear you to shreds.” But she was so, so wrong.

Svetlin’s Facebook friend list comprised entirely of other Romani - most of whom were from his own tribe. They did not ridicule him. They did not judge him. They did not demand of him to specify, explain, or justify his fear. On the following day, when they talked about this among themselves, Martina did not witness a single person laughing or criticizing or even discussing how Svetlin cried on Facebook. When people did mention him, it was with a sincere “Wonder how he’s doing, let’s check in on him.”

This is why Svetlin didn’t think twice about going live. There was never going to be any stigma.

The Romani didn’t do any of the things people in mainstream society do when faced with a real mental health problem in another person. They didn’t try to conceptualize, reframe, “calm him down,” or “cheer him up.” They also didn’t shy away from him, hide, gawk from afar.

Here is what they did do.