Community Corner

Comedy Night at Quinlan to Raise Awareness for Mental Health

Five South Asian comics bring laughter, and hopefully money and awareness, to a culturally-focused nonprofit that targets mental health.

Mental health is no laughing matter but one local South Asian nonprofit hopes that laughter will bring awareness to the matter in its first Laugh It Off Comedy Night at on Friday night.

“This is a fundraiser for us as well as a way to encourage people in the community to take charge of their mental health,” says Parijat Deshpande, founder and executive director of MySahana, a South Asian mental health awareness nonprofit.

Laughter as medicine is a big mission point for MySahana.

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“There are a lot of ways to change your health,” she says.

A star-studded South Asian comic line up that includes Sammy Obeide, Priya Prasad, Kabir Singh, Tapan Trivedi, and Alay Joglekar will take the stage from 8:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Feb. 10.

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Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door.

The five comedians are all from California, three—Obeide, Prasad, and Trivedi—have Bay Area connections.

Deshpande has a background in clinical psychology and said in her South Asian culture there’s a lot of stigma related to mental health concerns.

“There’s a lot of misinformation of what mental health is,” she says.

And it’s just not talked about much. Deshpande says talking about any mental health issue "normalizes" things. When people hear others talking about something that they, too, may have felt they realize they're not alone.

Mental health symptoms present themselves differently in different cultures, too, she says, which further suppresses the subject in her culture.

“We are dedicated to providing education and decreasing misinformation about mental health issues in the South Asian community. MySahana is the only nonprofit of its kind in the entire U.S. that provides solely culturally relevant information about mental health,” Deshpande says.

MySahana doesn’t provide direct services at this time, but focuses on education, awareness and getting the conversation started.

For more information about MySahana and to see the variety of subjects it covers such as divorce, depression, anger management, alcoholism and more, visit www.mysahana.org.


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