The Little Engine That Could: Nine Years later
The Story So Far
Some 9 years ago, as a former news anchor and ex-health editor, I was pretty startled at the lack of quality credible information around mental health and mental illness in India. There was little mainstream attention except when it came to ‘sensational’ high profile celebrity cases and tragedies, and the overall feeling was that Mental Health is a global, non-Indian problem (‘an American invention’, was the allegation some of you may have heard).
Partly that’s due to lack of awareness and stigma, and partly due to lack of representation, right? Back then, when we could get stories of Mental Health on air (after fighting for the airtime as you can imagine), it would be with an Indian mental health professional but non-Indian ‘case study’. (Yes, the pandemic changed things big-time. Also Insta-therapy, but that’s a whole new story.)
In any event, around the time I was toying with the idea of kicking off my own site and project, and looking for viable sources of funding, I saw a Tweet by someone in another city, looking for help for a friend. I saw the Tweet two days later and DM’ed (it was a more innocent time) to say I presume you’ve found some reliable help.
I was shocked and appalled to hear that no, in fact, no one had come forward, and while sending some helplines and publicly available contact information, decided I could at the very least create a website and share information. I was able to leverage the network I had as a former Health Editor and put together the first few posts around helplines, ‘expert columns’ and my own thoughts.
My first original piece for The Health Collective is also a call to action: http://healthcollective.in/2016/06/mental-health-and-you/
Three people in fairly quick succession wrote in to say they’d like to share their own stories (anonymously/ with a pseudonym) and that is what changed the entire trajectory of The Health Collective.
We started focusing on stories of lived experience, working on original reportage with an India lens, featured mental health expert columns and my favourite, maybe, comics and artwork to make more of this more accessible. I was sure that I wanted this to be conversational, accessible and inclusive. And as we started, we found a team, a tribe, a collective that wanted to help and contribute.
Nine Years on: Some 500+ stories later, along with those 4 works of non-fiction published by Simon and Schuster, I can only say that it’s been an incredible ride and learning experience.
I shared a bit this month my first thank yous, but here’s a longer roll call! A giant thank you to my partner in crime Abhishek Kumar, as well as my first conspirator in chief, Karan Thakur, and huge gratitude to the early advisors and experts who believed in the cause, helped me think through the ethics and code of conduct and commissioning — Arpita Anand, Ratna Golaknath, Varkha Chulani, Dr Achal Bhagat, Dr Amit Sen, Dr Samir Parikh and Professor Vindhya Unudurti, as well as those first few contributors with their stories of lived experience (You can read some of our first stories on living with bipolar disorder, living with schizophrenia, and dealing with depression and anxiety).
These are all people who tamped down any natural scepticism as to whether we would survive a few months, let alone years, and were critical to our mission.
We’ve grown and survived thanks to the generous time, talent, and commitment of many other contributors, including: Meera Haran Alva, Kishore Mohan & Merryn John, Solo, Ishita Mehra, Adwaita Das and Pia Alize Hazarika (who also designed our logo!).
Huge thank you to Deepa Singh Bais, Devanik Saha, Sukanya Sharma, Vandita Morarka, Swarnima Bhattacharya, Kamna Chhibber (who’s really gone above and beyond, including kicking off our Hindi video content), Anne Sureshkumar for kicking off our Tamil content, and Meghna Mukherjee for *all our work together, and the #Grief Circles. Thank you Nishant Arora for getting us some amazing videos including with cricketer Robin Uthappa! Sunalini Mathew lent her editing skills to us, as did a few others (thank you!!).
Amrita Tripathi
Tanmoy Goswami and Shubhrata Prakash have been such leading lights in this field and I’m grateful to have them as #OG Tribe members. Thanks also to Himanjali and the whole team at Simon & Schuster for commissioning and working on the Mindscape series of books (yay!) and Life, Interrupted.
Arpita, Meera and Kamna agreed to co-author books with me for the Mindscape series (we featured stories of lived experience on Depression in a first of its kind book for India, with a huge thank you to our 9–10 contributors, as well as a guide on Young Mental Health, and a book on Anxiety)
Also a huge shout to Dr Soumitra Pathare and Dr Abhijit Nadkarni, who invited me to co-author the book on Suicide Prevention, Life Interrupted: Understanding India’s Suicide Crisis*.
(*If you or anyone you know feels distressed, please know that help is available. We have listed helplines on our site)
And finally:
🙏 Big time thanks to each of our readers and contributors along the way. I can tell you even close friends were super-sceptical that we would find a readership for content on Mental Health. But so many times over the years, I’ve got to meet some of you, or hear from you, and it’s been so gratifying to also have so many of you readers turn into contributors.
Thank you always to folks who have been patrons, as well as Harsh Jain for creating some of our fab stationery / merchandise!
It takes so many people (as you can see!) to build anything of value. So to come back to that original question, I guess you could say it takes a tribe. I don’t know about legacy but I can tell you it’s been incredible validation and hugely gratifying to have been a part of this little project that could. And did.
If our stories have resonated, we’d love to hear from you! We’ll have a separate page on here for The HC (‘Best of’) as we work on next steps. 💜
Member discussion