Shefali Shah on the 22 Hours That Began Her Therapy Journey
Shefali Shah opens up about the 22 sleepless hours that pushed her into therapy, finding Dr Vishal Sawant, and treating mental health as routine care.
Shefali Shah has spent decades playing women who sit with complicated emotions. Now, in a fresh conversation with Bollywood Hungama, she is talking about the moment she decided she needed professional help with her own.
Her new memoir — The Audacity of Being: A Sort-of Memoir, published by Bloomsbury on October 1, 2026, has put her on a run of unusually personal interviews. The therapy chapter is among the most revealing.
The school psychiatrist who turned the question on her
Shefali’s first brush with mental health support did not begin with her own diagnosis. It began at her children’s school, where a psychiatrist had come to speak about attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Convinced her son showed the signs, Shefali approached the doctor.
The psychiatrist met her son and said he was fine. Then she turned the focus back to Shefali. “She asked me, ‘What is your problem?’” the actor recalled, adding that the line became a running joke between them.
The moment stopped being funny when Shefali returned during a rough patch. She had been awake for about 22 hours after coming from the gym without eating and wanted something to help her sleep. That exchange led to a clear thought: “I just thought that I wasn’t equipped to handle it.”
Why she reframed therapy as maintenance
Shefali said there was no single “earth-shattering” event behind her decision to continue. Instead, she came to a practical conclusion: some problems deserve a professional, the way a persistent allergy deserves a dermatologist, not another layer of cream.
That framing is the centrepiece of her message. For years, she approached therapy only when a crisis arrived — including a stretch when work was scarce and she felt low. Eventually, she noticed that a crisis-to-crisis rhythm was no longer helping her in the same way.
Finding a therapist who refused her old report
Shefali later began working with Dr Vishal Sawant after an introduction. Their first interaction set the tone: when she tried to hand over a previous assessment, he said he didn’t want to look at it.
“He never labelled me, which was fantastic,” she said. Instead, he normalised the idea that everyone moves through high and low phases — and that she might simply feel those swings more intensely than someone else.
Here’s what her account underlines:
- The first mental health professional she approached was the school psychiatrist she visited over her son.
- A 22-hour stretch without sleep became the moment she asked for help with herself.
- Dr Sawant declined to read an older report so he could approach her without a prior label.
- His early goal was for Shefali to reach a point where she no longer needed him.
Therapy as a mirror, not a manager
One of Shefali’s clearest points is about what therapy does not do. A therapist, she said, is not there to dictate your choices. “He will just tell you, ‘This is what it is. Now you figure what you want to do,’” she recalled.
Her therapist’s aim was self-sufficiency. Today, she can often recognise a low before it becomes overwhelming, even if she is not sure she has reached the destination he once described.
For Bollywood fans watching a star talk about this without a scandal attached, the value is in the ordinary rhythm she describes: check in, name what is happening, and choose the next step.
Source: Bollywood Hungama
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