Dr Robin Sewlal
Mental health affects every South African family, and Johannesburg’s roundtable had one message: “it’s OK to say I’m not OK.”
Advocate Robin Sewlal spent years arguing cases in courts before radio pulled him in a different direction. That pull, and the organisation it eventually produced, brought together six speakers and a packed room at eMedia in Dunkeld West on 26 August for a Radiocracy Roundtable on “The Mental State of the Nation”.
Sewlal chairs Radiocracy, the organisation he founded in 2001 to explore how radio, democracy and development intersect. He came to it sideways. His career started with freelance shifts at The Leader newspaper and Capital Radio, alongside his legal work, and it never really stopped.He served as Associate Director at the Durban University of Technology’s journalism department, where he taught radio to students.
He has edited two books along the way: Reflections of the South African Media, 1994 to 2019, released on Mandela Day in 2019, and My Radio Memory: Listening to the Listener, published in 2023 to mark a century of radio broadcasting in South Africa.
That second book pulled together stories from a hundred contributors around the country, along with vintage adverts and memories of stations long gone off air. It’s this two-book, decades-long relationship with radio that shaped his conviction, aired at the Johannesburg mental health event, that the medium has real work to do in normalising conversations about mental health. Radio reaches people television and print can’t, he said, and that reach comes with responsibility.
The mental health roundtable, run in partnership with eMedia and facilitated by veteran broadcaster Uveka Rangappa, opened with Sewlal calling mental health a “national priority”, a line that set the tone for what followed. Rangappa has anchored at Talk Radio 702, 94.7 and eNCA over a broadcasting career that started at Lotus FM and East Coast Radio in Durban, and she kept the panel moving through some difficult territory without letting it turn into a lecture.
Dr Kalai Naidu, a psychiatrist attached to the University of Pretoria’s department of psychiatry who specialises in severe mood disorders, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, pushed back on the idea that these are lifestyle problems people can simply manage. Psychiatric illness, she told the room, is a chronic medical condition that needs proper, sustained care, not quick fixes, and she pointed to South Africa’s younger generation as increasingly exposed to it, with social media use a significant factor.
Dr Sundeep Ruder, an endocrinologist based at Life Fourways Hospital, connected the dots between mind and body. Chronic stress doesn’t stay in the head, he explained. It shows up in diabetes, high blood pressure and hormonal disruption, the same lifestyle diseases turning up across every income bracket.
Mindset development specialist Jabu Zwane, who founded the Mindset Development Institute and serves as vice-president of the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa, spoke about the financial strain that follows grief, drawing on his own escape from poverty and homelessness. He said that pressure alone is enough to grind men in particular into silence, a pattern several people in the audience recognised in their own lives.
Brandon Fairweather’s story carried the room. Open-heart surgery at 28 for a congenital valve defect, followed years later by two strokes, a near-fatal haemorrhage and a cancer diagnosis, gave him more reason than most to understand anxiety from the inside. He wrote it all down this year in The Hell Inside Our Heads, and told the panel that the setbacks, brutal as they were, ultimately strengthened his resolve to heal and to talk openly about what recovery actually looks like.
Paula Quinsee, author of Embracing Conflict and a coach who spent over fifteen years in marketing at firms including Standard Bank and Nedbank before shifting into relationship and workplace culture work, turned attention to employers. Mental health wellness days look good on a calendar, she said, but they don’t substitute for leaders who actually examine whether their culture builds resilience or just papers over survival mode.
Asked by Rangappa whether South African newsrooms are pulling together on this issue, Sewlal didn’t hedge. Print, radio, television, and digital outlets need to work in concert rather than compete, he said, if the country is going to shift public understanding of mental illness at any real scale.
Guests travelled from as far as Durban to fill the auditorium, and many used the open floor to share their own experiences, some of them raw and clearly still unresolved. That, organisers said afterwards, was the point. A room full of strangers being honest about what they’re carrying did more for the evening’s message than any of the prepared remarks, and it’s the reason Radiocracy keeps returning to this format rather than settling for a panel that talks at people instead of with them.
The takeaway, repeated by more than one speaker before the night wound down, was simple enough to fit on a placard: it’s OK to say you’re not OK. Whether that message travels beyond eMedia’s Dunkeld West boardroom depends, as Sewlal would likely argue, on how seriously the country’s media houses take the job of saying it out loud, often, and together.
