Your mother asks on the phone, usually as the call is winding down, and you tell her you’re fine.
People tend to accept “fine” the way they accept a receipt at the till, without reading it.
Some of that is kindness. The person asking has a parent in hospital back home, or a landlord who wants next year’s cheques early, and you’d rather not add to it.
Sometimes it is less generous, a suspicion that they never wanted the real answer.
A lot of it is small. You fall asleep at 2 now instead of 11, and you snap at your sister over something minute. Your radio stays off when you drive and Sunday evenings start to feel like the night before an exam.
Last year the World Health Organization counted more than a billion people living with a mental health condition, and named anxiety and depression the second biggest cause of lasting disability. (WHO, September 2025)
This year’s World Mental Health Day runs under the theme Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change. It reads wonderfully on a banner.
But to say how you are, plainly, across a dinner table with the news on and your father half listening, is harder.
At The American Wellness Center in Dubai Healthcare City, our Psychology Department meets plenty of people who said fine for a year or two before saying anything else.
Where Stigma Lives Now
Stigma and politeness run the same line. It’s a joke in the family group chat, about someone’s cousin being “a bit mental”.
People still hear that depression means a weak faith, and someone who already feels like a disappointment takes that literally.
Depression is a medical condition, and depression and mood support therapy treats it like one.
In an American Psychiatric Association poll last year, 54% of adults in the US said stigma had eased over the past decade. The rest didn’t.
Dr. Muhammad S. Tahir, the psychiatrist and neurologist who started AWC in 2016, put the language problem plainly in an interview:
“A human being is a human being, whether healthy or ill. The illness is something separate, something we treat. I never say a person is ill. I say the person has an illness.”
We apply the harsher version to ourselves. People who would never call a friend weak for seeing a therapist will happily call themselves weak for needing one.
What an Honest Conversation Takes
One plain sentence in place of fine is usually enough to start, something like “I haven’t been sleeping” or “work’s been a lot lately.”
This year’s theme asks for lived experience to be heard, which puts half the work on whoever is listening. Most people are worse at that half than they think, and the mistakes are predictable:
- Accepting the first “fine” without a second, softer try
- Jumping to advice inside the first minute
- Answering with a story about your own worse week
- Repeating it to someone else later, even out of concern
People who open up and get waved off, or turned into a topic at the next family lunch, often don’t try a second time.
Where The Second Try Happens
Whether someone tries a second time usually depends on who’s around them. A mother can hear it in a voice note before her son has worked out that anything is wrong.
Children pick up the vocabulary early. A girl who hears “stop being dramatic” at 8 will use the same words at 28.
In that same American Psychiatric Association poll, 77% of adults agreed that untreated mental illness does serious harm to families. Though, it rarely looks like harm at the time. It looks like a marriage gone silent or a teenager who doesn’t come out of his room.
Work is harder. In a NAMI and Ipsos survey of American employees last year, analysing comfort talking about mental health:
- 81% were comfortable with a close friend at work
- 57% with their manager
- 39% with HR
- 28% with senior leadership (NAMI/Ipsos, February 2025)
Where staff had been trained on mental health, 57% felt more at ease raising it, and 65% of managers did. Training costs less than a resignation.
Gallup’s latest global workplace report found 48% of workers in the Middle East and North Africa had felt a lot of stress the day before they were asked, the third highest of 10 regions. (Gallup’s 2026 report)
When the Sunday dread has turned into exhaustion that weekends no longer fix, therapy for work burnout is a direct route.
For a lot of people, the second try happens in a clinic, with someone whose whole job is to ask twice.
A first session with one of AWC’s psychologists is mostly a conversation. You talk about what’s been happening and for how long, what sleep and work look like, and what you’d change.
It stays between you and your psychologist. The exceptions are narrow, usually a serious risk to someone’s safety, and a good clinician explains them in the first session.
Plenty of people come in between fine and falling apart, which is a good time to come.
The Next Time Someone Asks
Someone will ask how you are again this week. Probably your mother, near the end of a call, when there are only a few seconds left and fine fits neatly into them.
One true sentence is enough, and it makes the next one easier.
If home still feels too close, start somewhere else. The psychologists at The American Wellness Center in Dubai Healthcare City will ask twice, and they’ll wait for the answer.
Book a first session when you’re ready. You don’t need the right words before you walk in. Most people don’t have them.
