Get Up, Aisha

Meet Aisha Rehman. She’s perfect.

She’s got a 4.0 GPA in honours Psychology, a loving mom, and a doting boyfriend. Other than the fact that she tries to overdose on Tylenol pills every now and then – but only when the pressure to be perfect is too much – she’s fine. Honestly.

Get Up, Aisha focuses on Aisha, a Pakistani-Canadian student who grapples with her compulsive need for control. When Aisha gets diagnosed with depression after a failed suicide attempt, she applies a checklist approach to curing the incurable.

A diagnosis gives Aisha the revelation she needs: she can cure her depression herself through proven methods like making friends or trying a new sport. And while we’re at it, why not kill two birds with one stone? Aisha’s been trying to find a killer thesis topic for months and her no-nonsense, tough love professor, Ray, has been behind her to get that proposal in. What better opportunity to try out these methods than with a thesis statement? A guinea pig to test on? Check. (You’re the most depressed person you know). A list of proven methods that could work? Check. (Obviously, empirical evidence be damned because this is a sample size of one, people). Sheer determination to make this work? Check. (Honestly, if this doesn’t work… that Tylenol bottle is always staring at her).

So with herself as the sole test subject and with help from her friendly-but-overwhelmed psychiatrist Alice, research, and good ol’ Google, Aisha makes a list of all the things that could potentially help with depression, like meditation, exercise, or learning to cook. She adds it all to ‘Aisha’s Depression Checklist’. She’s got this.