Priyanka Chopra Jonas Talks About Dealing With Depression After Her Father’s Death (Photo Credit: Instagram/Priyanka Chopra Jonas)
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Actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas recently turned author after she launched her memoir Unfinished, wherein she shared her journey from winning Miss World in 2000 to becoming a global icon. In her book, she has revealed how she fell into depression following her father’s death.
The White Tiger actress’s father, Dr Ashok Chopra, who was a physician in the Indian Army, died on June 10, 2013, after a long battle with cancer at the age of 62. At that time she was set to start filming of 2014 film Mary Kom. She said that she used work as her therapy to cope with the death of her father.
“Five days after Dad died, the day following my father’s chautha, ‘Mary Kom’ was scheduled to begin shooting, and although the film’s producer, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, offered to postpone the start date, the sense of duty and discipline I’d inherited from my father and his twenty-seven years in the military wouldn’t allow me to accept his offer…” wrote Priyanka Chopra Jonas in her memoir, as reported by News 18.
She further wrote, “As always, work was my therapy. I put all of my grief and a piece of my soul into that character and that film. It’s what drove me and it’s what allowed me to continue functioning.”
Priyanka Chopra Jonas also mentioned that her Krrish co-star Hrithik Roshan also used his connections at Air India to arrange for her father’s immediate flight to London from where he was transferred onto a flight to New York for further treatment at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
After her father’s death, she even tried a few therapists but never found a right therapist for her. Priyanka Chopra also revealed that her family tried to make sense of the grief on a trip to Turks and Caicos in December 2013. “Beyond those few conversations with my family, though, I never really examined or dealt with my grief. Instead, I tried to power through. I was doing my best to be resilient, but the fact is that I was burying my grief rather than coming to terms with it.”
She further wrote, “I imagined I might leave behind the sadness I was still feeling when I left Canada. Instead, I fell into a depression. While I thought I had powered through my grief, I was still carrying it with me, apparently keeping up my end of the deal to hold it close wherever I went. I didn’t know exactly how to move from a world of grey back into a world of vibrant colour, but one day I figured out one simple thing I could do: I could stop hiding and reengage with life.”
