My name is Jamsheed B. Sidhwa. I am a common working man with heightened empathy to depression and suicide that claimed three people I have known. I promised at the last suicide funeral in Nov 2012 to do ‘something’ about depression, in sensing there needed to be a significant improvement to stop all kinds of preventable deaths commencing from childbirth.

That promise grew into an investigative quest to figure why the world does not seem to know or care ‘decisively’ enough to more effectively stem an avoidable epidemic like suicide at its pre-depression roots.  Health literacy which would cost little at the front end for both individuals and governments,  balloons up to huge ongoing suffering & costs.

In digging deeper, it dawned that it is the quite the same through whole spectrum of health disorders. It typically starts with upfront unguided “freedom of choice”, a.k.a. health illiteracy which permits unhealthy food & lifestyle choices that convert to disorders and deny the “freedom of being at ease”, i.e. being dis – eased.

Innocent people do not seem to realise that we may have freedom of choice, but we are not free from its consequences. We need to stop taking good health for granted and treat wellness or illness as a lucky dip. It was bizarre to hear “sickness creates good business”, and perhaps it is the reason why illness is permitted to grow.

Hence began my life mission to champion the cause of wellness at grassroots level, when it became clear that what had begun as my mission to counter depression needed substantial up-scaling to help a lot more people.

Absence of health literacy was not only claiming millions of lives every year, but is also leaving distraught in their wake, millions more family, friends, colleagues and communities. I felt that the people of our world deserve a North Star or a Southern Cross to look up to and be guided to wellness, instead of helplessly drifting to illness.

I hope I will have served humankind well, albeit that I will have to keep reminding individual outspoken doctors from time to time, to unite and write our World’s First 20/20 Visioned Wellness Policy.