CSR: Spreading Healthcare Awareness Through Stories
It is easy to remember stories. In fact, a chance of being able to narrate a story of a movie accurately is very high for a person, even if they have seen the movie only once, long time ago than of them being able to narrate the 2nd law of thermodynamics even after reading it over and over again. Why is that? According to research, messages delivered as a story can be up to 22 times more memorable than just facts. Stories always work better when it comes to learning things. But we forget about this idea when we talk about serious issues.
However, Dr Pradeep Vaghasiya, a renowned Psychiatrist & De-Addiction Specialist from Ahmedabad is changing the norm. With their team, Dr Pradeep Vaghasiya along with Dr Himanshu Desai is on a mission to bring awareness on mental health on the topics of depression, bipolar disease, panic attacks and many more. And they are creating this awareness through the medium of theatre. They as a team, engage the audience by enacting different scenarios to educate people on various topics and deliver the message through storytelling. This campaign is only limited to Ahmedabad right now, but they plan to take it to other cities.
On asking about the success rate of the campaign, Dr Vaghasiya said, “People are more open to stories. When we went to Cadila Pharmaceuticals, one of the employee thanked me for helping him understand psychiatric illnesses health better because he thought someone from his family might be suffering from it. These kinds of stories keep coming to us, which encourages us to do more. When people are just fed with data, they don’t pay attention to it. But when the same is told to them through stories, they understand it better. No one likes to be taught, but everyone loves stories. This is the core philosophy that we focus on.”
Dr Vaghasiya and Dr Desai mainly focuses on psychiatric illnesses and aim to provide the best care to their patients. They also provide counselling to parents and couples to help them through tough times. Such novel initiatives will definitely help the country break the taboo around the illness.
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Regards,
The CSR Journal Team
