Durga and the Resilience of Mental Illness
In this International Women’s Day tribute, Nabarni Das explores Durga and the Resilience of Mental Illness. Moving beyond physical tropes of strength, she honors the “war without applause,” celebrating the fierce, quiet endurance of women surviving invisible battles every day.
There is a kind of suffering we know how to honour.
When a person battles a terminal illness, we speak in the language of war. We call them fighters, survivors, and warriors. We measure their courage in hospital corridors, in bald heads and IV drips, in numbers that climb and fall on monitors. When remission arrives, we celebrate it as victory. We say the body is strong, the spirit is stronger. Resilience, in this context, is visible—sanctioned, communal.
But there is another kind of suffering that remains unnamed.
Addiction. Depression. Anxiety. Bipolar disorder. Eating disorders. Trauma that does not show up on most scans. Illnesses that do not announce themselves with machines or measurable decay, but live quietly inside the mind, folding themselves into routine until they are mistaken for personality. These struggles do not receive victory parades. Their remissions are not honoured. Instead, they are questioned: Are you better now? Why were you weak in the first place?
This comparison between mental illness and physical illness is often made carelessly, as though one exists to invalidate the other. But it is not the comparison that is cruel. What is cruel is the hierarchy we construct from it. A hierarchy in which physical suffering is dignified, while mental suffering is moralised. One is met with empathy, the other with suspicion.
And so, resilience is selectively awarded.
Durga was born out of necessity. She did not emerge because the world was ready to admire her. She emerged because nothing else worked. Order collapsed. And so, she was molded from accumulated rage and desperation. Her endurance was demanded.
That is what we forget when we speak about resilience as spectacle.
The nine-day battle Durga fought was not a single, cinematic act of triumph. It was repetition, persistence. It was waking up each day knowing the fight would not end quickly. That is what mental illness looks like. Not one decisive moment, but an exhausting continuity. A war without applause.
Addiction, for instance, is framed as a moral failure rather than a medical reality. We speak of relapse with disappointment, as though recovery were a linear performance that, once interrupted, invalidates all previous effort. But we do not speak this way about cancer. We do not accuse a body of betrayal when healing does not hold. We do not ask what kind of person allows their cells to rebel again.
Why, then, do we do this to the mind?
Perhaps because mental illness threatens the myth we rely on most: that control is absolute. that discipline is salvation. That strength is visible only when it conforms to productivity, silence, and neat endings. A mind that fractures, disrupts that myth. It reminds us that autonomy is fragile, that willpower is not infinite. And so, instead of confronting that fear, we reframe illness as weakness.
But endurance does not stop being endurance merely because it is invisible.
A person who wakes up every day with depression and still chooses to exist is not weak. A person who resists addiction, not once, but repeatedly, knowing relapse is statistically probable, is not fragile. They are doing what Durga did—fighting without guarantees. Fighting knowing the battle may not end cleanly. Fighting even when victory looks like simply surviving the day.
There is something deeply violent about asking someone who has survived mental illness to apologise for it.
The remission of a terminal illness is treated as a miracle. The remission of a mental disorder is treated as a liability. Employers ask questions. Friends walk on eggshells. Families watch for cracks. Recovery is never allowed to simply be. It must constantly prove itself. And if it falters, even momentarily, the entire struggle is rewritten as personal failure. This is not compassion. It is conditional tolerance.
Mental illness exists in a cage. It is tolerated only when it remains quiet, palatable, and non-disruptive. But Durga was never quiet.
She was not asked to soften her rage to make others comfortable. Her fury was sacred. Her violence purposeful. She did not apologise for the destruction she caused in order to restore balance. She was allowed to be overwhelming because the threat demanded it.
We deny that same permission to people whose minds revolt against them.
We ask them to be functional while healing, to be grateful while drowning, to be inspirational without being inconvenient. And when they cannot meet those demands, we withdraw recognition. We say they did not work hard enough. As though effort were measurable only in outcomes, never in endurance. This refusal to recognise mental resilience is not accidental. It is structural. A society that depends on constant productivity cannot afford to honour forms of survival that interrupt efficiency. There is no economic incentive to celebrate someone whose victory looks like rest, therapy, medication, or simply staying alive.
And yet, that is where Durga lives now.
She lives within people who choose sobriety knowing temptation will return. In people who manage their illness daily without the promise of cure. In people whose battles are quiet, cyclical, and ongoing. In people whose victories do not end stories but sustain them.
Durga is not only the slayer of demons. She is the one who keeps fighting when the demon does not die.
To recognise mental resilience is not to diminish physical suffering. It is to dismantle the false binary that allows empathy to exist only where pain is visible. Both struggles demand courage. Both deserve reverence. Both reshape the person who survives them. And perhaps that is the most unsettling truth: that resilience is not exceptional.
Durga is the person who survives quietly, without medals, without miracles, without certainty—and keeps going anyway. She was never one battle. She was never one kind of strength.
She is still not one.
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