Tick Tock: The Health Collective's Year Gone By

This year was an interesting one for us to take stock at The Health Collective, for the first time really since inception. It's not been an easy decision, but we put a stone on the olde heart and hit pause on commissioning new content, as we decided to reassess where we will access funding from. (More on this and our new approach in the new year!)

There are a few things I'm glad we could do:

• Our first Listening Circle around Grief

This has been something we wanted to do for a while, and I'm glad we could do something that participants saw value in. Thank you to our participants for joining a confidential, safe space, and thank you to a dear friend of The Health Collective, therapist Ratna Golaknath for facilitating, and ensuring that we didn't carry home heavier burdens with us once done. We will be iterating on this and looking at whether it's feasible to facilitate in the new year as well.

• Health Collective Talks episodes to spread the good word

Interviews with some incredible voices in the Mental Health ecosystem - please do check out our Youtube for more videos and hit subscribe while you're there! We also hosted a chat on Climate Change and explored some of the intersections we need to start paying attention to.

• Spotlight: Mental Health and the Workplace

Features on Imposter Syndrome, Dealing with Stress and Burnout - huge shout to Kamna Chhibber for joining these, in collaboration with Tap in Tribe, my startup for women professionals.

The Imposter Syndrome episode was our highest viewed on Youtube this past year, so if you want to catch up, I promise you it's worth a listen!

I've also had some wide-ranging early-stage conversations with many in the startup space on the importance of prioritising Mental Health and access to services as well as support so let's see what we get up to in 2024.

• Featuring on the G20/ C20 agenda

Joining the wonderful teams at Kovalam, Kerala and Faridabad, Haryana, respectively to represent The Health Collective, during the G20 Empower and C20 (civil society grouping aligned to the G20) was definitely memorable, and felt like an important contribution – we know that we can't just talk about mental health in our silos, so the more arenas and opportunities we have to bring the subject out into the open and dust it off, with as much nuance as possible, the better!

• The Mental Health Hindi and Tamil explainers
  Enough said, no? Huge thanks to Anne and Kamna for kicking us off on the language trail this year. We'll be looking for some partners and budgets to do this meaningfully but till then we will keep plodding along
  
• Mental Health and Books coverage

We are getting back some of the book-related mojo! Apart from publishing some great book reccos, we also had a chance to spotlight a few new books in the mental health space. (And not just plug our own... but see below! All good things come to those who wait...)

• The grand finale for the Beloved series of poems

Adwaita Das has been a wonderful contributor at The Health Collective since 2019, with her kick-ass Affirmations series and her heart-felt Beloved series of poems, which came to a grand finale this month. I'd encourage you to go and check out her work on our site for some great vibes and a pop of healing and art. (All heart)

• More regular social content

Thanks to our lovely intern Khushi, we've been trying to get more consistent with our social content. This is also in direct response to feedback from some engaged community members. (We heard you!)

• Most importantly: Showing up in real life as a mental health ally, not just on a panel, stage, virtually. This is the tough one, folks, and requires us all to do the work, put in the effort. Learning to be an ally to yourself? Also pretty key.

Miscellaneously:

• We've connected as many people as possible to publicly listed services on our site (healthcollective.in/contact)
  
• Loved being interviewed by Puneet and the YourDOST team, it was truly lovely of them to notice our work all these years and give us a shout. Watch here!
  
  

• Conversations around Suicide Prevention: These continue to be the toughest, and perhaps most important. Thank you to those who keep the faith and try to make change possible. (The rest of you please pick up the book Life Interrupted, co-authored with Dr Pathare and Dr Nadkarni and/or order it for your libraries and organisations) Book info here

• The sheer delight of having one of our books featured on Lilly's book club! (Yes Lilly of Lilly Singh fame!) C'mon! And thank you to our dear Health Collective follower who shared this with us!

• I had the chance to talk to a fab group about Mental health and Storytelling, and also the importance of media coverage, sharing stories of lived experience and how the stigma really starts and ends with us – yes that includes you and me, at various forums. Thanks to the team at Bumble for organising a conversation around ending tech facilitated violence, thanks to the Design Up Bounce Back bootcamp earlier this year where we spoke about mental health in the context of layoffs and the workplace. Thanks to so many of you for our conversations 1:1 – it really is a gift and a privilege to have you share some of your thoughts, and knowing that The Health Collective has enabled some of that is beyond my wildest dreams. So thank you... here's to more conversations, more comments, message, queries, questions, calls and all of it.

WHAT'S NEXT, BUT WAIT WHAT?

To conclude: We did good, with limited resources and bandwidth, even by the punishing standards we aim to set ourselves. We chose not to follow up on a few conversations only to help prioritise our own selves and will be more focused, as we build.

Going fwd into 2024, we are half-way through conversations to ensure we only pick up sustainable work projects, including speaking gigs and workshops. We will aim to remain pleased that we kept fighting the good fight (even though it can very muchfeel like Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the hill only to have to start right back at the bottom...)

But you know what? We know that we're not alone.

We know, critically, you're not alone, whatever you are going through. There are people who care about these stories – your stories – and this work (our work). That's not too shabby at all.

*New: We've launched a buymeacoffee for ad hoc support and are creating some tailored memberships (15 in total) to try out some new things in the new year, but that's if you feel up to checking out something new with us. NO stress, and thanks for all the fish.

Note: We'll have to get back to another format, not having used Ghost to its full potential in the least, but see you in another form somewhere!

Check out our site: healthcollective.in for all the stories and links and give us a follow on social!