Ten Years of Building The Health Collective

So the first thing to say is that it will be ten years this year. TEN years of The Health Collective. That it has grown, morphed and shape-shifted, but survived is a testament to many of *you, the #OG tribe, as well as new readers, younger players in this now-thriving mental health ecosystem.

But once upon a time, it was a very different space. So here's a look behind the scenes.

The Story so Far

I. 

Stories are how many of us make sense of the world. We read stories of lived experience when it comes to mental health and mental illness, and we begin to understand what other people might be going through.

In fact, when I set up The Health Collective, India’s first ‘storytelling’ platform for mental health and illness, it was far from the norm to have stories on this at times unfathomably vast subject. Hard to imagine now, in an Insta era of pop psychology and home-grown influencers but a decade ago, most reporting was in the mainstream media, and usually only involved Indians when there was a ‘sensational’ death by suicide of a celebrity. I would know, having been a staunch member of the mainstream media, and a Health Editor and news anchor at a national news channel to boot. We fought to get stories of mental health on air, and even when we could, we usually had international ‘case studies’ and Indian ‘experts’, following a set pattern or template of story-telling for broadcast media.

A lot fell through the cracks.

I decided to set up the site after seeing someone tweet about a friend in Mumbai who was unable to access help, and indeed didn’t have any leads on where to access help. It’s a tweet I saw (as a stranger) two or three days later and it was acutely distressing that they had not gotten any helpful information in the interim. We immediately set up with some resources and helplines, and I was able to leverage my network as a journalist to get that information together and publish it online. I also started off with a few columns on ‘why’ we all need to pay more attention to mental health, and pretty soon, I got some first-person stories shared by email, some anonymously.