This year on World Mental Health Day, Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan’s daughter Ira Khan revealed that she has been clinically depressed for more than four years. Now, in a new video, the 23-year-old star kid talked about her privilege, her parents’ divorce, and being subjected to sexual harassment.
She started the video by laying the privileges that she has had for being Aamir Khan’s daughter. She even listed down a three-point strategy that she uses to get over her hardships. However, she was still diagnosed with depression.
Sharing about it she said, “Between the time when my behavior started to change and the time that I asked for help was about three and a half years. I would still use this strategy and it didn’t help. I stopped taking care of myself, sleeping a lot, and think it was normal. I used to keep myself really busy and slowly I moved to immobility.”
She further added, “I used to have a lot of control over my emotions but suddenly I didn’t have that control anymore. I used to daydream all the time. Suddenly at 17, I would cry and I didn’t know why I was crying. Towards the end I would try and rationally figure out, ‘what could I possibly be upset about?’ ‘what bad things have happened in my life?’” This is where she talked about her parents’, Aamir Khan and Reena Dutta’s divorce.
“When I was small, my parents got divorced. But that didn’t seem like something that would traumatise me because my parents’ divorce was amicable. They are friends, the whole family is still friends. We are not a broken family by any means.”
In the video, she also opened up about being sexually abused when she was 14-year-old. “When I was 14, I was sexually harassed. And it was a slightly odd situation in the sense that I didn’t know whether the person knew what they were doing and it wasn’t happening every day.”
“It took me about a year to be sure that they knew what they were doing. Immediately, I wrote to my parents an email and got myself out of that situation. And once I was out of that situation, I didn’t feel so bad anymore. I wasn’t scared and I was like this is not happening to me anymore and it’s over. I moved on and let it go. From time to time I would talk to myself about how I was silly to let it happen.”
“Again, it was not something that has scarred me for life and make me feel as bad as I was feeling when I was 18-20,” she added.
She added that she doesn’t have a reason why she behaved so strange because nothing bad has happened to her. However, abruptly concluding the video, she said, “My own sense of privilege or my own sense of feeling that I had to have a good enough reason to feel like this made me not talk to anyone.”
Watch the full video here:
It takes a lot of courage to openly talk about your personal life on a platform like social media when you know you and your family can be subjected to hate and brutal trolling. More power to you Ira!