Weaving Between Light and Shadows, Said and Unsaid

Spiritual teacher and life coach Kwang presents a series of interviews about mental health, with a focus on Singapore.

This third installment in the author’s series, following Growing Pains (2022), features conversations with a wide variety of professionals about mental health. The project is a compilation of interviews that the author and histeam conducted with 75 people, from medical doctors and psychiatrists to politicians and business executives. The book’s overarching theme is how mental health is an “invisible force” in people’s lives, and how one’s environment affects one’s well-being. In each chapter, Kwang or a team member interviews subjects who provide care and support in a specialized area. In one chapter, for example, Kwang talks with mental health counselor Vickineswarie Jagadharan about the nature of grief in general and her personal experiences in dealing with the loss of her son to suicide: “Over time, I realized the pain never [goes] away,” she tells Kwang. “As time goes by, the pain gets lesser and lesser, but it will always be there.” In another chapter, geriatrician Nur Farhan Bte Mohammad Alami describes the particular vulnerabilities of elderly people: “If you are twenty or thirty years old and you have emotional baggage, then by eighty, you have a huge baggage.” Everything from interpersonal relationships to collective trauma gets time in the spotlight. Fortunately for this book series, Kwang is an excellent interviewer—informed but never overbearing, and always ready to abandon a set line of questioning in favor of following a conversation wherever it may lead. The core of his own health care ethos, sketched in his preface to this volume, is to “keep going,” no matter how dark things seem, to admit to one’s struggle, and to ask for help. As he points out during a talk with Parliament of Singapore member Carrie Tan, although people now talk more openly about mental health issues, “Something is still missing.” This book works to provide that missing element with sympathetic and frank discussions.

A clear, informative, and wide-ranging Q&A collection.