Priyanka Chopra Jonas is on a mission to make health care more accessible
The actress is using her massive platform to anoint new role models in her fight to change how we think about diabetes.
As the daughter of two doctors in the Indian military, Priyanka Chopra Jonas grew up spending a lot of time at the hospital while her parents were on call. A medical career was not in the cards—“I am squeamish even at my own cut,” she says—but one experience assisting her mother and father in a rural village left an indelible impression: “It helped me recognize that where you’re born really changes the trajectory of your life.”
Her own path took her from teenage pageant queen to one of the world’s most in-demand actresses, making history as the first South Asian woman to lead an American network drama with Quantico (produced by ABC, which shares a parent company with National Geographic). Along the way, Chopra Jonas has become intimately familiar with an unrelenting health crisis happening back home, which spans villages like the one she visited as a child to dense urban centers. India is facing a diabetes epidemic affecting more than 100 million people. Perhaps even more alarming: About half of all Indians living with the disease remain undiagnosed, due in part to stigmas and misapprehensions. Today, as Chopra Jonas prepares to take on a role in Varanasi, the upcoming blockbuster breaking records as one of India’s most expensive movies, she is working on a campaign encouraging people in India to recognize the signs of diabetes and to successfully navigate the disease—a timely mission that also happens to be deeply personal.
When Chopra Jonas began dating musician Nick Jonas in May of 2018, she knew little about diabetes. Type 1, which Jonas was diagnosed with at age 13, is an autoimmune condition caused in part by genes and environmental triggers, necessitating lifelong insulin therapy; Type 2 is prompted by genes and lifestyle choices, among other factors, and only sometimes requires insulin. By the time the couple married just a few months later, she’d seen firsthand the conscientious monitoring Type 1 requires. “I used to wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, just to see if he was breathing,” Chopra Jonas says. But she also came to understand that, with early detection and proper treatment, diabetes need not be a limitation.
Over the past five years, Chopra Jonas has spread that message as a board member of Beyond Type 1, the nonprofit Nick Jonas co-founded in 2015 to reduce stigmas and direct people to lifesaving resources. At first, Beyond Type 1, which has a digital community of more than 90,000, was largely focused on the needs of those in the United States. But this past December, with Chopra Jonas’s input, the organization launched an education campaign about Type 1 in India. While the country has the highest number of children and teens with Type 1 in the world, “awareness is really low,” Chopra Jonas says. Many people are either unfamiliar with the symptoms or afraid a diagnosis could render them unable to work or marry. “The desire to keep it secret is ridiculously strong,” says Deborah Dugan, CEO of Beyond Type 1.
To nudge people toward early diagnosis, Beyond Type 1 created a video last fall featuring real Indians living with Type 1—from a young karate champion to a pastry chef. After Chopra Jonas shared it on Instagram, the video garnered 279 million views. Beyond Type 1 offers online resources in Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil—and recently gave half a million dollars to fund other Indian organizations promoting early detection. As a result, almost 200 people have signed up to be Beyond Type 1 ambassadors in India, helping raise awareness by hanging posters, visiting clinics, and pushing for change on an international stage. While this effort specifically targets Type 1 in India, it may arguably shift the stigma around the disease for all diabetics in the country.
Last September, Beyond Type 1 brought one of its new ambassadors to a health-focused UN General Assembly meeting to speak about living with the disease. Each of the ambassadors’ stories is different, but they all share an underlying message—the same one Chopra Jonas is broadcasting. “Don’t be afraid of the diagnosis,” she says. “You can handle and live with this condition—and actually thrive with it.”
