The GenMH Blog by Generation Mental Health

In Conversation with Maalvika Bhuvansunder, an IBD Patient-Advocate

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:28:24 GMT

A conversation with mental health professional and IBD advocate Maalvika Bhuvansunder on lived experience, community-led care, and the urgent need to integrate mental and physical health in chronic illness advocacy.

We are joined today by Maalvika Bhuvansunder, a mental health professional, who wears multiple hats in the advocacy space. She’s a volunteer with IBD Patient Support Foundation India , a non-profit organisation that supports persons with Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) in India, where she works with them on their mental health initiatives

She is also a peer group facilitator for the South Asian chronic illness group with Generation Patient , a nonprofit organisation created by and for young adults living with chronic medical conditions. She was also the 2025 PxP steering committee member for their patients in Research Conference 2025. She has also briefly volunteered with Generation Mental Health in the past.

When her higher education and IBD diagnosis overlapped in 2016, the intersection of physical and mental health advocacy became inevitable. What drew her to IBD advocacy was the Crohn's and Colitis Young Adult Network fellowship, a community for YA with IBD. Through them, she also had the chance to connect with Nikhil, the founder of IBD India.

We chat with her about her journey and discover the mental health toll that IBD takes, and the resources available to help manage it.

Kritika (GenMH): In what ways has your personal background, whether professional, academic, or lived experience, shaped the advocate you’ve become?

Maalvika : Being a mental health professional, I have always loved being part of community-based projects and initiatives. I’ve always believed in working at the grassroots, in listening, in building systems that actually serve the people they are meant for. But when I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, it stopped being just professional; it became deeply personal.

My diagnosis hit me like a brick. I felt lonely, overwhelmed, and honestly quite invisible. I understood the theory behind coping and resilience, but living through it was different. The fear, the uncertainty, the silence around chronic illness, especially in our context, made me realise that there is a huge gap between knowledge and lived reality. That is when I knew something needed to be done.

CCYAN gave me that platform. It connected me with other young adults living with the same condition and showed me what a community can truly look like. Being in a space where you don’t have to over-explain, where your fears are understood without judgment, and where your struggles are not minimised. It made me realise how powerful lived experience is when it is organised, supported, and amplified.

Today, my advocacy is shaped by both who I am professionally and what I have lived through personally.

Kritika (GenMH): Could you walk us through a project or campaign that you feel captures the essence of your advocacy? What does it aim to change or address?

Maalvika : In collaboration with the Mariwala Health Initiative at IBD India, we trained the iCall TISS helpline counsellors on the nuances of living with a chronic illness to educate more mental health professionals. We had reached out to the MHI outreach team, submitted a proposal and received funding to carry out this project. We were able to train over 20 counsellors, and it felt great to impart lived-experience knowledge to my fellow MHPs.

Another project that I am really proud of was organising the PXP regional webinar in India. We coordinated with other patient advocacy groups in India and, with PXP’s help, conducted an online panel discussion on the importance of patient partners in research and at the point of care.

The virtual conference symposium for GenMH “ Silent No More: We Are the Story and the Solution ,” truly captures the essence of my advocacy because it brings together everything I stand for: lived experience, suicide prevention, structural inclusion, and youth leadership. We intentionally built a diverse, international panel of young advocates from both LMIC and high-income contexts, all under 30, all living with chronic illness. The structure was deliberate. It centred around individual lived narratives framed through systemic issues: medical gaslighting, health anxiety, barriers in LMICs, trauma-informed care, peer support, and youth leadership in policy.

Kritika (GenMH): What have been some learnings from working on these initiatives?

Maalvika :

One, the power of advocacy, when collective voices come together, the power it holds. Two, the importance of collaboration. To bring a change, collaboration is very important. And finally, how important mental health is when advocating for chronic illness.

Kritika (GenMH): How do you see the cultural context determining the attitude towards the intersection of chronic illnesses and mental health that your advocacy operates in?

Maalvika : In India, the focus is often on physical symptoms, while the emotional toll is minimised or stigmatised. Socio-economic barriers such as affordability, limited access to integrated care, and uneven access further affect treatment and recovery. People are often made to choose between either physical healthcare or mental healthcare, as it might not be affordable. This should not be a choice but a right for every individual.

Family dynamics can be supportive but may also discourage open conversations about mental health. In contrast, high-income countries may have better structural access but still face fragmentation and stigma.

Reflections on Advocacy & Global Mental Health

 Kritika (GenMH): From your perspective, what is the most crucial element in designing an effective mental health intervention or advocacy campaign?

Maalvika : Clarity of purpose. You need to deeply believe in the issue you are working on. For me, it starts with identifying an area that truly matters to you, something that feels urgent, personal, and worth committing to long-term.

Kritika (GenMH): How do you view the role of lived experience in shaping meaningful mental health solutions and movements?

Maalvika : Lived experience is not just “a perspective” in mental health spaces, it is expertise. Living with Crohn’s disease, even in remission, has shown me how chronic illness carries a constant psychological stressor: hypervigilance about symptoms, fear of relapse, anxiety around long-term medication, body image concerns, uncertainty in relationships, and the quiet exhaustion of having to repeatedly explain your condition.

In South Asian contexts, where awareness of invisible illnesses is limited, this is compounded by minimisation and stigma. The mental health toll is not only about depression or anxiety, but it’s also about anticipatory grief, identity shifts, loneliness in hospital rooms, and the pressure to appear “fine” when your body has a history of betrayal. Lived experience creates a community in that silence. It transforms private distress into collective language and pushes movements beyond awareness toward structural compassion in healthcare systems, families and policies. When those who have carried the weight are centred, solutions become more humane, realistic, and deeply informed.

Kritika (GenMH): If you could shift one thing: policy, narrative, funding, access, or stigma, what would make the biggest difference?

Maalvika : If I could shift one thing, it would be policy backing because policy is what translates empathy into accountability. We have narratives. We have awareness campaigns. We even have passionate advocates. But without formal policy integration, chronically ill youth continue to fall through the cracks of both physical and mental healthcare systems.

Right now, chronic illness and youth mental health are often treated as parallel conversations rather than intersecting realities. There is very little structured mandate requiring integrated care models, routine mental health screening in gastroenterology or speciality clinics, trauma-informed protocols, or patient partnership frameworks in research. Without policy-level recognition, these practices remain optional rather than essential. Stigma matters. Access matters. Funding matters. But policy sustains change. For me, shifting policy is about moving from “this would be nice to have” to “this is required.” And that is what would make the biggest difference.

Looking Ahead

Kritika (GenMH): Looking forward, what feels like the most urgent issue or gap in global mental health that you believe needs addressing? Is there anything you wish more people understood about mental health advocacy?

Maalvika : I THINK MORE INVOLVEMENT OF LIVED EXPERIENCE IS WHAT IS REQUIRED! Instead of just being used as propaganda, lived experience should be incorporated into all aspects of mental health initiatives. As a mental health professional, I know how important it is to listen to the voices the interventions are designed for, and to ensure the highest quality of care, it is vital to incorporate them. Especially when we talk about chronic illness and mental health, which is still a little underresearched, listening to the people experiencing it first-hand will be a game-changer, as they will help inform the care that is required.

Kritika (GenMH): What message or encouragement would you offer to someone who wants to get involved (in advocacy) but doesn’t know where to start?

Maalvika : Explore organisations that are run by YA who are in some form related to or have been through what they are advocating for.

I would also urge others to take things slow if advocacy feels too heavy. It is OK to PAUSE, take a break and distance yourself if it feels too much. Nothing should come at the cost of your well-being.

Offscreen, Not Offline: The Hidden Cost of Constant Notifications

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 07:44:10 GMT

Constant notifications are reshaping how our brains focus and rest. Chinasa Lovlyn Nwachukwu writes about phantom vibrations, burnout, and the hidden psychological cost of staying connected.

Photo by appshunter.io on Unsplash

Our phones are our constant companions, sitting in our palms everywhere we go, whether we’re on the move or sitting idle. If you live in a country like China, where nearly everything has been digitized, you’ll pay at restaurants with your phones, order rides through apps, and even mark attendance in class; the dependence is even more visible. It is almost impossible to go a full day without a phone.

Over time, this constant proximity has become so normal that it feels like an extension of us. And that brings us to a concerning byproduct of this proximity: the constant notifications that light up our phone screens, often followed by the urge to check who or what needs our immediate attention.

But did you know that notifications were never designed to be neutral?

Technology ethicist Tristan Harris has spoken extensively about how digital platforms are intentionally designed to capture and retain our attention. Notifications are structured by app creators to pull us back in, to create a sense of urgency, and to make us feel as though something important might be missed if we do not respond immediately. They are basically competing for our attention.

The Illusion of Digital Detox

Humans have a long history of creating problems and then inventing solutions to fix them. In this case, the problem is that we are constantly drawn to our phones, which disrupts our focus and presence. To compensate, we offer “digital detox”, which is packaged as a seemingly radical idea of intentionally stepping away from screens and giving ourselves distance from our devices.

Digital detox culture promises a break from endless scrolling, offering relief through as simple a task as staying off your phone and reducing screen time. However, the deeper issue isn’t just how much time we spend looking at screens. It’s the pull back into them, the falling back into the old habits, once the detox is over

On average, a smartphone user receives roughly 60 to 80 notifications every single day; for teens, this number can exceed 200 . Even if you only check your phone for a fraction of those alerts, that still means dozens of interruptions daily, and that’s not including the times you were already on your phone or the times you picked it up even without a notification.

These pings and buzzes don’t just grab our attention. They fragment our focus and make sustained concentration harder to maintain.

Your Brain on Constant Anticipation

If you do not see the problem yet, let’s go deeper, all the way into the brain itself, because even when we put our phones aside, our brains stay online, waiting and anticipating the next notification.

The Phantom Vibration Syndrome (PVS) , or the sensation that your phone is vibrating when it isn’t, is a very real phenomenon experienced by many people. In one early medical survey, almost 70% of adults who carry electronic devices reported experiencing phantom vibrations, with some experiencing them weekly or even daily. Other studies have found that phantom phone signals, like imagined vibrations or ring alerts, happen regularly and are more common in people who use their phones frequently.

This happens because when your brain expects something like a notification, it starts predicting it. Your nervous system becomes sensitized to the patterns of phone alerts, and even when there is no vibration, buzz, or ring, the brain can misinterpret other sensations as though a notification occurred.

This has likely happened to you. For instance, have you ever caught yourself rushing through your work just so you can quickly check your phone? Or paused what you were doing to check your phone because you thought you heard it ring? Or set your phone aside, but still feel the urge to look at it every few minutes just to see if a notification came through? That isn’t just a habit, it’s your brain in a state of hypervigilance, constantly scanning for cues it has learned to associate with reward or connection.

Let’s open another can of worms with the phenomenon of C ontinuous Partial Attention , which occurs when our brains keep scanning for updates or notifications while we try to focus on other tasks, leaving us mentally divided and less able to sustain attention.

The Psychological and Physical Cost Beyond Distraction

So, being constantly tied to your phone might not seem like a big deal. You may think, “I check my phone relentlessly, but it doesn’t really affect me.” In reality, this constant engagement is taking a toll on both your mind and body.

Psychological Costs

Reduced deep focus: Even when you put your phone in another room, your thoughts often drift back to it, wondering who texted, whether an order you placed has arrived, or what notifications you might be missing. This distraction makes sustained concentration difficult.
Increased anxiety: This is especially common when you keep receiving negative updates or are anxiously awaiting a specific response.
Mental fatigue: Constantly being “on”, checking messages, emails, and notifications for other apps can lead to cognitive overload.
Difficulty being present: Linked to continuous partial attention, when your mind is divided between the task at hand and your device, you start finding it hard to fully engage with people, tasks, or experiences.

Physical Costs

Burnout: Managing constant notifications and device-based tasks can consume a large portion of your day, leaving little energy for other responsibilities. Additionally, chronic phone use can cause physical exhaustion, along with elevated cortisol levels(the stress hormone).
Digital eye strain: Prolonged screen use can lead to headaches, dry eyes, and blurred vision.
Poor sleep quality: You’ve probably heard that blue light exposure from screens can disrupt circadian rhythms, making it harder to fall asleep and reducing sleep quality.
Neck and shoulder pain: Poor posture while using phones, craning your neck and hunching your shoulders can create chronic discomfort over time.

Our phones are designed to keep us connected, but the constant notifications come at a cost, not for the manufacturers or app designers, but for us, the users. Whether it’s the mental strain of continuous partial attention or the physical tension from hours spent online, the effects are real, pervasive, and often invisible. Self-awareness is the first step in recognizing just how much these little pings shape our daily lives.

About the Author:

Chinasa Lovlyn Nwachukwu is a mental health coach, writer, and the founder of My Mental Health and I (MMHI), a platform dedicated to creating culturally relevant digital content for mental health awareness. You can find her on LinkedIn or through her website .

Can we really just “shake it off”?

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 05:35:06 GMT

More people now understand the physiological impact of stress, so body movements might be the key to releasing momentary stress.

“Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation.”

— Katie Cannon

Do you find yourself clenching your jaw tightly when you are having a stressful day at work or school? Or do you find your palm clenched into a fist? Some people have other nervous tics that manifest during stressful events, like shaking their legs uncontrollably or picking their skin. Even when it isn’t as obvious, our bodies respond to external triggers, often using various parts as storage spaces for turbulent emotions. If emotions are stuck inside the body, can we shake them off? Was Taylor Swift on to something?

Shaking for emotional catharsis…

Unpleasant and uncomfortable feelings can often get bottled up and stored in your body. Sylvia Tillman , a Certified TRE® Provider, and the founder of What is the Alternative , explains, “When we are stressed, we tense up. And the body stores this tension in the muscles. Many people notice after a particularly stressful time, that psychosomatic pain is (re)appearing in the form of tension headaches, back pain, teeth grinding, gastrointestinal issues etc. These are all signs of stress when one tries to hold everything together/keeps a stiff upper lip, but this translates as physical pain. Much tension is stored in the psoas muscles, also called the muscle of the soul, as it holds many emotions.” Psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden, who wrote The Psychology of Self-Esteem advocates for accepting our feelings without exception, instead of disowning, denying, or repressing, which can lead to physical pain and issues.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's seminal work, The Body Keeps the Score , also points to the impact of trauma on our bodies. He asks, “How can people gain control over the residues of past trauma and return to being masters of their own ship?” The answer comes from bodywork practitioner, Licia Sky, who shares “ you can’t fully recover if you don’t feel safe in your skin.”

Can literally shaking off negative emotions bring you to a place of equilibrium? This isn’t an unheard theory: we’ve seen our pets do it. Do you know how sometimes dogs or cats vigorously shake off their body? After a bath, an intense vet session or a confrontation with another dog or cat, our pets take their sweet time shaking from tip to toe and tail. It comes to them instinctively. It is, as we are learning, a primitive response mechanism that helps reset the tension and stress stored in the muscles.

How can humans more proactively incorporate this primitive response into their coping strategies for the stresses of everyday life? Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises , or TRE for short, might be the answer. These exercises help regulate the nervous system by activating our innate reflexes (shaking or vibrating), which help calm it. The result? Emotional and physical equilibrium.

Meditation for people who don’t like to meditate

How do TRE exercises actually work? Tillman shares, “TRE is like an internal massage – with better effects as the shaking process reaches 'hidden' muscles that a massage therapist can't reach from the outside. TRE is also called meditation for people who don't like to meditate.”

At a time when healthcare resources are stretched thin, TRE provides an effective way for clients to take charge of their well-being and health. This is because TRE exercises can be learned and used throughout life; you only need to practice regularly for about 8-10 minutes every other day. Somatic tools like TRE are also a great option for people who either a) don’t find benefit in talk therapy, or b) want to use a mix of therapies, or c) feel like they have outgrown the benefits of talk therapy and seek a more holistic treatment plan.

As Tillman explains, “It's great to give our busy minds a rest and let the body do the work – especially as the majority of people are too much in their heads anyway, many feel disconnected from their bodies. The shaking mechanism of TRE resets the nervous system, and by practising on a regular basis, many people report having much more resilience [to stress].” TRE, therefore, isn’t just a curative therapy, but also a preventative one.

What do the exercises exactly look like ? Tillman provides us with a peek into the exercise regimen, which begins with six warm-up exercises to fatigue the muscles and help with the tremoring process, followed by a floor sequence.

The importance of involving your physical body when healing from emotional or psychological distress

Photo by Danielle Cerullo on Unsplash

To borrow again from bodywork practitioner, Licia Sky as cited in Dr. van der Kolk’s book, “The body is physically restricted when emotions are bound up inside. People’s shoulders tighten, their facial muscles tense. They spend enormous energy on holding back their tears—or any sound or movement that might betray their inner state. When the physical tension is released, the feelings can be released. Movement helps breathing to become deeper, and as the tensions are released, expressive sounds can be discharged.”

Tillman reinforces this idea, “Tension held in the body can manifest as physical pain, e.g., headaches/migraines, back/shoulder/neck pain, teeth grinding, gastrointestinal issues, anxiety, irritability etc., typically psychosomatic pain, where your doctor checks you from top to bottom and tells you that you are absolutely fine or ‘it's all in the head.’”

As mentioned before, TRE can be a great alternative, as well as, complementary to cognitive therapies for a holistic healing plan. For many people, the brain is already working overtime, so relieving it while working with the body can be game-changing for those who are exhausted by stress.

TRE, explains Tillman, can also help discover subtle experiences and traumas. For example, when one arm is trembling more than the other, it provides space to explore why that might be. Our body remembers, and we owe it to ourselves to heal everywhere we store the memory of stress or trauma.

Alongside talk therapy, somatic modalities can facilitate bigger breakthroughs in the healing process.

Author Bio:

Kritika Narula is a writer, journalist, content marketer from Delhi, India. You can find her on Instagram and Threads , and on her website .

An earlier version of this article was published in the now-defunct IndigoBlue Magazine.

Cover Photo by ALEXANDRE DINAUT on Unsplash

Finding Authentic Portrayal of Chronic Illness & Disability in Romance Books

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:37:29 GMT

Kritika Narula examines how romance novels offer an affirming, nuanced framework for portraying chronic illness and disability. By centring care, connection, and community, the genre provides a compassionate template for stories that balance authenticity with hope.

Representation of chronic illness and disability in fiction is often a challenge. It’s a slippery slope; too easily, stories slip into extremes: they can be glamorised or sensationalised; they can become too tragic or too one-dimensional. Disability stories, in particular, are often boxed into two familiar patterns: the overly tragic, “woe is me” narrative, or the overly heroic, “they overcame all obstacles” arc.

There’s a big issue when we think about these extreme narratives with respect to chronic illnesses. Chronic illnesses don’t fit neatly into either of these frameworks. A chronic illness is ongoing, not something to be defeated once and for all. It isn’t a story of a singular victory or loss, but of daily management, adaptation, and resilience. That’s why traditional plot structures—like the “rags to riches” or “challenge to victory” arc—don’t quite work here. But one genre that’s doing a formidable job of portraying these realities, cloaked in a lot of hope, is romance.

Why Romance is Uniquely Suited to Chronic Illness Narratives

The genre allows the main characters to maintain an affirming, tender, and hopeful stance regarding their chronic illness. Usually, when a chronic illness diagnosis befalls a person, it is easy to descend into catastrophic thinking, assuming that life is going to be extremely hard. And while there’s no denying the very complicated nature of this type of grief, within the structure of a romance novel, there’s commensurate hope to combat this grief.

TL;DR: They don’t deny the reality of the pain, but still manage to offer a refreshing representation of hope in living with such conditions.

Romance as a genre is uniquely positioned to represent chronic illness because of its built-in elements. Every romance comes with an inherent promise: a happily ever after (HEA) or, at the very least, a happily for now (HFN). Readers enter the story with the assurance that, despite the bumps along the way, the ending will be hopeful. This framework enables romance novels to portray characters, living with and loving despite chronic conditions, without reducing the narrative to a tragedy.

Illness =/= identity

How do the main characters get closer to each other in a romance novel? They share vulnerable moments, stand up for each other, and show up when it's most important. There is so much joy in connection and finding your person. This way, a romance plot ensures that illness never becomes the sole focus of the character’s life or story. Instead, it’s one part of a larger tapestry of vulnerability, intimacy, and growth. Chronic illness becomes a lens through which the characters—and the readers—explore love, community, and resilience. It grounds the story in authenticity: yes, the pain and limitations are real, but they coexist with joy, laughter, affection, and connection. Romance is able to balance authenticity of pain with narrative hope in a way that few other genres can.

This balance also reassures readers. First, it affirms that struggles do not define a character’s entire identity or life. And second, it acknowledges that while these struggles permeate every aspect of daily existence, within that reality, there is still space for love, personal growth, vulnerability, and the sustaining power of community.

Tropes to the rescue: Caretaking and Found Family

Chronic illnesses are often steeped in stigma and misunderstanding. Because they’re invisible, they’re also easy to dismiss. People can’t see them, so they struggle to empathise with what they don’t understand. As Get a Life, Chloe Brown incisively portrays:

“Most people had trouble accepting the fact that Chloe was ill. Fibromyalgia and chronic pain were invisible afflictions, so they were easy to dismiss. Eve was healthy, so she would never feel Chloe’s bone-deep exhaustion, her agonizing headaches or the shooting pains in her joints, the fevers and confusion, the countless side effects that came from countless medications.”

That’s precisely where the romance genre steps in and flips the narrative. Romance thrives on empathy. When a character falls in love, they are—almost by design—forced to stretch their empathy muscles, to see the world through another person’s eyes. In stories that centre chronic illness, this naturally evolves into caretaking—one of romance’s most tender and recurring tropes.

Caretaking is a recurring trope in romance, and it offers a compelling lens for chronic illness. Caretaking in romance isn’t about dependency or pity; it’s about attentiveness. It’s about learning what someone needs and choosing, day after day, to show up for them.

In Evie Mitchell’s Love Flushed , Lincoln learns about Annie’s Crohn’s disease when she is in the middle of a bad flare-up, so he takes her home and looks after her.

Later, they have this exchange:

"I didn't realize you stayed." Linc lifted an eyebrow.

"You were in pain, where else would I be?"

"I went out. The Crohn's and Colitis group said eggs were good during flares." He reached down beside my bed, handing me a giant wheat bag. "And I got you this. Your other one is tiny."

I found myself at a loss for words. "I don't know how to take this. Why? You never cared before."

"I cared, Annie.”

In Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert , when Redford learns about Chloe’s fibromyalgia, he doesn’t retreat from her pain but instead takes the time to understand it. Just like Lincoln, Redford educated himself on the illness and often cooked for her. He also paid attention to her energy levels, especially when she might be putting on a brave front. Chloe’s inner monologue had her wondering about his attentiveness:

“ He should’ve had no idea about her slight, lingering headache, or the thrum of pain that her patch couldn’t quite touch, insistent enough that she was already frustrated. She supposed whatever it was about him that made him notice might be the same thing that made her trust him. ”

Every romance plot is built on small gestures and events that lead to trust and intimacy. Chronic illness, with its daily rhythms of care and vulnerability, provides fertile ground for such moments. The Googling, the quiet research, the rearranged plans, the thoughtful check-ins—these become love languages of their own. Copious amounts of research is how Lexi helped Riley in Chelsea Curto’s Hat Trick , when the young hockey star is adjusting to his new reality of limb loss and a prosthetic leg, during which he also grows irritable and depressed.

Partners, friends, and found family step into roles of emotional and practical support, creating a positive depiction of interpersonal care. Annie informs her friends in Love Flushed , how Lincoln didn’t stop extending tangible help in easing her life through her flare-up:

“ He's been by every day. He bought me eggs because he'd read that they're good to eat during a flare. And a new heat pack because he worried my other one wasn't big enough. He's doing all these tiny, thoughtful things and I…. ”

The romance genre also frequently showcases how community functions as a care network. This manifests in the form of the “Found Family” trope. Very often these are colleagues, teammates, friends, whose steady presence and empathy remind readers that living with chronic illness doesn’t have to mean living in isolation.

Riley, in Hat Trick , finds his way back to his old hockey teammates and friends, and they offer him unconditional support as he progresses through physical therapy and monumental occasions, such as when he attempts to skate on the ice again. Even as his new reality and career pivot mean he won’t be playing for his team anymore, they stick by him through thick and thin, proving the power of community in healing.

In the end, romance novels remind us that love, in all its forms, is an act of care — and that even amidst chronic pain or limitation, tenderness, understanding, and connection can thrive. These stories don’t erase illness; they illuminate the many ways life and love continue alongside it.

Author Bio:

Kritika Narula is a writer, journalist, content marketer from Delhi, India. You can find her on Instagram and Threads , and on her website .

Youth Reimagining Leadership in Mental Health: Event Report

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 10:06:47 GMT

Youth mental health interventions are most effective when they recognise young people as collaborators and change agents in shaping the very systems that impact them. More insights from the Global Mental Health Action Network's July panel.

When we think about young people in the mental health space, the conversation often begins with how to design programmes that support their wellbeing. Youth mental health interventions are most effective when they recognise young people as collaborators and change agents in shaping the very systems that impact them. They are not only recipients of support but also experts with lived experience, whose insights are rooted in navigating the realities of today’s world. They bring invaluable knowledge of what works, what doesn’t, and what still needs to be imagined.

At the heart of this is the idea that young people should have a voice in the future they will inherit . While this principle is increasingly echoed across institutions and policies, its implementation is far from straightforward. Youth leadership must be intentionally fostered and redefined in the context of mental health, where leading might look softer, slower, more care-driven. It must move beyond buzzwords to create space for young people to shape systems with authenticity, equity, and sustained impact.

To foster dialogue on this, the Global Mental Health Action Network organised a panel discussion on “Youth Reimagining Leadership in Mental Health” on 22 July 2025 as part of their Mental Health for All Webinar Series.

Panellists included Erica Zissis (Grand Challenges Canada | Being Initiative), Jaclyn Schess (Generation Mental Health), Cat Pham (EMBRACE Vietnam), and Anne--Sharlene Murapa (Kurapa Moyo). Judah Njoroge of Integrative Wellbeing moderated the session.

Njoroge prompted the panellists to consider the idea of youth being at the forefront of change in the mental health landscape and implored them to share what it looks like in their respective contexts. Anne--Sharlene Murapa, from Kurapa Moyo, kicked off the conversation with a compelling demonstration of young people’s agency, “ It means not waiting for permission. As young people, we tend to wait for others to co-sign our ability to take action.” In a world where youth are at the forefront of change, they tell themselves, in the words of Murapa, “I have the capacity and mindset to ideate a solution and identify people I can work with to implement it. ”

We think of leadership as being on the forefront, but it is also so much about co-creation, she explained.

Cat Pham from EMBRACE Vietnam likened the ecosystem of mental health advocacy to a board game that offers you alternatives to lead different life courses. She explained, “ There are so many ways you can navigate the mental health space, so many ways you can contribute and engage with others in the field: you could be an educator, a trainer, a project lead, a policymaker trying to make mental healthcare more accessible . ” Ultimately, according to Pham, what matters is that you can contribute meaningfully to the space, making a fruitful addition to the broader context.

From among those based in the Global North, Erica Zissis from Grand Challenges Canada | Being Initiative, shared the funder perspective on this: “ Our core belief is that people closest to the issues are best placed to identify these challenges and needs and come up with impactful solutions . ” Acknowledging young people as drivers of change, Zissis emphasises that finding and supporting research and innovation led by youth is a funding priority. As a resource, she shared Being's New Report: Youth Voices — A Guide to Meaningful Youth Engagement in Mental Health Funding .

Jaclyn Schess, founder of Generation Mental Health, brought in the perspective of a youth-led organisation, “ Generation Mental Health is uniquely positioned in that we are a youth-led organisation that is also seeking to support other youth-led organisations. In acquiescence that young people are often the best sources of insight, both in identifying what supports their mental health and in naming the challenges they face in leadership roles, Generation Mental Health has made a conscious effort to nurture a space that will shape youth leadership within the organisation itself. ”

“At its core”, Schess shares, “this is about the democratisation of power for young people. While non-youth-led organisations can and should support this work, youth-led organisations can bring lived-experience-driven perspectives and foster a deeper sense of agency among young people who are both leading and being served by these programmes.”

In the next segment, the panellists reflected on how they entered the mental health space and the barriers they encountered in stepping into leadership roles.

Pham offered a peek into Vietnam’s fledgling mental health space. She acknowledged the privilege of being able to start a mental health project, but underscored the difficulty of sustaining it: balancing school with unfunded work, and operating in a sector with no clear roadmap. “We’re figuring things out as we go,” she said, adding that the future of a clearer mental health ecosystem in Vietnam could offer more defined opportunities for youth engagement. A key challenge for her remains ensuring meaningful representation from marginalised communities in the design of local solutions.

Murapa shared that while passion drives the work, “ mental health support is so underfunded that we’re constantly being stretched in ways we didn’t think possible .” She spoke of leaning into community and indigenous knowledge, but also the ongoing effort to protect her own wellbeing: “ Just because I’m a mental health activist doesn’t mean my mental health isn’t important .”

Schess shared, “ At the forefront was my own experience with mental health challenges, which started at a very young age.” What proved most impactful for her was accessing peer-led support at university, which shaped her recovery and sparked a sense of agency. “Being involved in advocacy and systems change can be really helpful for your mental health journey,” she noted, while also highlighting the challenge of entering formal organisational spaces where young people may be heard but rarely included in actual decision-making. “It’s not just about opening the door—it’s about giving them a seat at the table. ”

This offered a robust segue for the conversation to explore how identity shapes how young people claim space.

Zissis noted that our lived experience expertise is being sought after by advisors and innovators. Our identity shapes and influences our perception, and that isn’t necessarily a limiting thing; leaning into our lived experience can be powerful.

“ Claim space not despite but because of who you are ,” she implored. Schess pointed out something she has learnt through the years of training young changemakers who, in turn, help other young changemakers on the ground, “ Young people are not a monolith, and you can't have a young person speak for or be a spokesperson for millions of young people .”

She also explained that youth organisations can offer a model for supportive processes, “ In a lot of youth organisations, it is normal to have a conversation about taking a step back when your mental health is not at its best. Perhaps other organisations can learn how we relay such things. Capacity strengthening will be key so people feel comfortable to be able to speak in those environments. ”

Pham had earlier in the conversation mentioned the very real challenge of including representation for young people with various identities. And while the panel agreed that it is hard to answer this universally — contexts differ and so do the definitions and scopes of diversity and identity labels — they offered a perspective shift to enable more spaces for young people, without worrying about scale. Murapa talked about how community gatherings can help address collective experiences of intergenerational trauma in a shared space. She also emphasised that solutions to mental health challenges don’t have to look a certain way.

Pham provided examples from the Vietnamese context, “ Appreciating diversity isn’t hard. It starts with humility about what you know and a curiosity to learn. In my context, age is a constant undercurrent: people often ask how old you are mid-discussion, which is strange but also telling. Being young can be both a benefit as well a disadvantage. Policymakers are listening to youth, but it can’t be a monologue led by a small council. We represent only part of the picture. ”

Burnout in activism is a well-documented reality, especially for those working at the intersections of lived experience and systemic change. The emotional toll of constantly showing up for a cause, for a community, for others, can make it difficult to pause and care for oneself.

Which brought us to the moderator’s final prompt, “How do you hold space for your well-being and balance it with showing up for others?”

Murapa, who had previously hinted at valuing her mental health, shared her practical approach with affirming conviction, “ I reference the work we do and look at intention and care as our values. We don’t do any work we do, to the detriment of ourselves .”

She added, “ It’s very important not to burden yourself with the need to solve everything. Trust that other people are going to step up and do the work, too .”

Echoing the sentiment, Schess agreed that collaboration and teamwork are the way to go, “At the end of the day, what helps me sustain is my team that I rely on. We are all working to reach the North Star together, and we can't get there if we are all burned out. It is very important to create an environment where we can ask each other for help, and also go out into the broader ecosystem and ask for help .”

Zissis advised not to get burdened by the expectations put on someone in a leadership position to be perfect: “ You can lead while also being transparent about learning and asking questions. Show up better as a leader by prioritising your mental wellbeing .”

Pham added, “ As young leaders, we should collaborate with those more experienced than us as well. I strongly believe that they want to help us, and we should reach out and open this space for both of us. ”

GenMH will soon launch a virtual Mental Health Policy Advocacy Toolkit. This is a self-paced walk-through of advocacy principles and practices, sharing lived experience perspectives, planning and evaluating advocacy initiatives and more! It was developed in partnership with Orygen, utilising materials and learnings from their Global Youth Mental Health Advocacy Fellowship, with funding from the UC Berkeley Social Impact Fund. This information is based on consultations with youth advocates worldwide. To stay up to date and receive updates when the toolkit launches later this year, sign up for our newsletter at genmh.org/contact or follow us on social media!

How Social Media Anxiety Creeps Up On Young People

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 13:43:26 GMT

Navigating the Hidden Toll: How Social Media Fuels Anxiety in Today’s Youth

Cover Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

Social media refers to all websites and applications that enable users to create and share content, as well as participate in social networking. The creation of social media was focused on sharing information more quickly and networking with people from various regions around the world. But with time, social media has become a breeding ground for pressure, fear, and anxiety.

In this article, we take a peek at the anxiety that youths of today face because of social media, and the different ways in which this anxiety manifests itself.

According to Healthline , anxiety is your body’s natural response to stress. It’s a feeling of fear or apprehension about what’s to come. This is a normal human emotion, but when it becomes excessive and disrupts your daily functions and activities, it needs to be addressed. Some examples of anxiety disorders include: Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Separation Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder (Social Phobia), etc.

Social Media Anxiety

This can be defined as the unease or stress that comes from using a social media platform. This comes with fear and pressure. This can be characterised by negative emotions and behaviours that come with the use of social media. These behaviours may include tailoring yourself to social media standards, the pressure to be on every trend and so on.

How Social Media Anxiety Affects Youth

Teenagers often behave in unpredictable ways. At that age, acting out and certain emotional outbursts are normal, but in some situations, when they become more inconsistent and uncontrollable, it is essential to examine the triggers.

Anxiety in youth affects key aspects of their lives: their physical health, academic performance, social interactions, and emotional well-being. It may exhibit physical symptoms, such as headaches, sleep disturbances, and muscle tension. In social life, young people may begin to isolate and avoid social situations. This affects their academic performance as they lose concentration in their schoolwork and start avoiding school.

Emotionally, these youths begin to develop fear, worry, and unease in certain situations. In the long run, these feelings can develop into panic attacks, social anxiety and related phobias.

How Social Media Brings About Anxiety

It is important to talk about how social media shapes “the vulnerable age” mentally. According to Australian Charities And Non-for-profits Commission (ACNC), “Vulnerable people are defined as people aged under 18 or other individuals who may be unable to take care of themselves or are unable to protect themselves against harm or exploitation”.

The U.S. Surgeon General released an advisory on the effects of social media, and it stated that teens who spend more than three hours a day on social media double their risk of depression and anxiety. This also put them at risk of the following tendencies:

Comparison trap

You scroll through social media and conclude, “Everyone on social media is happy.”

This statement is a trap that most people fall for. The younger mind can not identify a mirage or a filter from real life, and as such the ready access to other people’s lives becomes fertile ground for the comparison cycle.

For young kids and teenagers, peer pressure exacerbates their feelings: being trendy or cool seems to be the priority, and social media has allowed them to showcase their possessions and portray a perfect life.

The endless comparisons between the lifestyles of their peers can cause negative feelings, and when they can't be met, they fester and lead to anxiety.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) syndrome

Cleveland Clinic explains FOMO as “ the feeling or perception that other people are having fun, experiencing new things or living a better life than you.”

Such feelings can breed with friends, but also with parasocial relationships we form online.
Statistics show that with the evolution of social media, more people, especially teenagers, exhibit this phenomenon as their activities and lifestyles are increasingly up for consumption. It brings about envy, low self-esteem and unease just seeing people have fun without you.

Social validation

This generation looks to the internet to learn how to look or dress, and in essence, validate their choices. If the internet says it's bad, then it probably is. If someone is not able to keep up with the standards of the virtual world, they are prone to being bullied and left out.
Often, they may judge themselves too harshly, even before the world does.

Phone Separation Anxiety

Also known as nomophobia, this condition can occur when a person becomes anxious after being separated from their phone or social media platforms. The causes include fear of disconnection, overdependence on the phone, and social pressure. This leads to a reduction in productivity, anxiety, and social isolation.

Bouchra’s Story: When Social Media Stops Being Fun

Bouchra first joined social media at just 11 years old. Like many others her age, it began as a fun way to connect and keep up with friends. But things took a turn when a falling out with her friend group led to online bullying. What started as a simple disagreement escalated into hateful comments and targeted attacks. Over time, Bouchra began to internalise the cruel words being thrown at her. The joy of being online faded, replaced by self-doubt and anxiety.

By the time the COVID-19 lockdown hit in 2020, Bouchra felt some relief to be away from the real-time pressures of social circles. But the break didn’t last long. New forms of online harassment emerged. She began receiving unsolicited images from strangers, an experience that further damaged her mental well-being and deepened her anxiety around social media.

It wasn’t until 2022 that Bouchra began actively seeking help. She joined support groups that helped her process her experiences and begin the journey toward healing. Today, she is finding ways to rebuild her confidence, set healthier boundaries online, and share her story to help others feel less alone.

Curbing social media anxiety

Here are some proactive steps we can take to help curb the growing impact of social media on mental health:

Encourage offline activities: Promote healthier alternatives like reading, physical exercise, creative hobbies, or learning new skills. These activities offer balance and can build self-esteem outside the digital world.
Set boundaries early: Establish clear rules around screen time. Create schedules that include device-free time and use screen limit settings to help reduce overuse.
Open up conversations: Educate children and teens about the potential downsides of social media. Build a safe, judgment-free space where they can talk openly about what they experience online.
Stay involved: Monitor their online activity—not by spying, but by staying engaged. Keep an eye out for concerning signs like excessive scrolling, withdrawal from offline life, or visible stress and anxiety.

While looking at preventative measures, we should also look at corrective measures like:

Seek professional help: Consider therapy with a practitioner experienced in youth anxiety. A mental health professional can help identify root causes and build coping mechanisms.
Develop emotional regulation strategies: Encourage healthy emotional responses through techniques like journaling, self-reflection, mindfulness, and grounding exercises.
Foster self-compassion: Help young people understand that it’s okay to struggle. Building emotional intelligence and self-awareness can go a long way in countering the internalised pressures of the online world.

Many young people don’t even realise they’re experiencing social media anxiety until it starts affecting their everyday lives. Yet the pull of social media, with its dopamine highs and validation loops, continues to draw them back in.

That’s why awareness, education, and protection are essential. Small steps, whether it’s setting boundaries, encouraging offline time, or simply starting a conversation, can make a big difference.

Change doesn’t have to be immediate or massive. But it does have to start somewhere. And it begins with us.

About the author:

I am Obanya Favour Isioma, a Nigerian mental health writer who writes from the heart about mental health, healing, and the messy parts of being human. Through honest words and gentle reflections, I bring to light tips that help you see more meaning to life.

How My Grief Became a Bridge for Mental Health Advocacy

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 12:28:32 GMT

Grief shattered my world, but from the wreckage, I built a bridge not just to leave behind my own pain and reach the shores of healing, but to carry others from darkness into light.

The day I lost my father — February 2, 2008 — I didn’t just lose a parent; I lost my sense of safety. For years, February, a month that is considered a time for the expression of love, became a month I endured, not lived.

But grief, I’ve learned over time, doesn’t just wound; it can also carve out spaces for purpose. That purpose found me in the lecture halls of the University of Uyo, in the quiet confessions of students who whispered, “I’ve felt this way too,” and in the energy of students who showed up when we decided to take action around mental health within the school community.

Turning Awareness Into Action

In 2021, alongside fellow psychology students, In partnership with the National Association of Psychology Students (NAPS), Uniuyo Chapter, I initiated and organised mental health outreaches that went beyond conversations.I wanted to meet people where they were — literally.

We organised a Mental Health Awareness Walk through the main campus and annexe, where we carried signs with messages like “Your Pain is Valid” , “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay.” “Overthinking no fit solve problem.” Students from different departments joined, some hesitant at first, but then, with growing confidence, we had more than 500 participants. And that was the birth of Safeplace Africa.

I also vividly remember “A Picnic for Healing”, where we sat on mats under the trees at Brook Street Uyo, sharing stories and coping strategies. Laughter mixed with tears as people realised they weren’t alone.

To bolster our initiative, I was active in stakeholder engagements as well — I met with school administrators, local NGOs, and even government health workers to gather support for the student community. We secured educational materials, trained peer counsellors, and made sure every student knew where to turn for help. One moment that has indelibly stayed with me? A student pulled me aside after an outreach and said,

“I was planning to drop out because I couldn’t handle the pressure. Today, I feel like I can breathe again.”

Why This Work Matters — No One Should Suffer Alone

I know what it’s like to carry grief in silence. It was barely two weeks after I got admission to study Electrical and Electronic Engineering that I lost my father. At Akanu Ibiam Federal Polytechnic, I struggled alone, convinced no one would understand. That isolation nearly broke me. Now, I’m determined to ensure no student feels that way.

The future? Intervening early — by meeting pain with action, one school at a time. We start by:

Partnering with secondary schools to train teachers as mental health first responders.
Creating student-led support groups where young people can speak freely.
Developing culturally relevant resources — because mental health isn’t “foreign” or “un-African.” Pain is universal, but healing must meet people where they are.

Grief as My Guide

February will always hurt. But now, when it comes, I light a candle for my father — and then get to work. Because the boy who sat on that bus - his dying father in his arms - to four different Hospitals in 2008 needed someone to say, “You won’t always feel this broken.” Today, I want to be that voice for others — whether in university campuses, secondary schools, or anywhere pain tries to isolate people.

We’re a little lost, but that’s alright," Night Birde reminds us. So let's walk together, through the uncertainties and the pain, because even in the darkest nights, we carry each other’s light. The way forward isn’t found alone — it’s built step by step, voice by voice, until no one has to whisper their struggles in shame..

— and as NAPS Mental Health Advocate of the Year (2022 and 2023), I’ve learned this truth deeply. Healing begins when we stop pretending to have all the answers.

About the author

Prince Nnanna Daniel is an award-winning mental health advocate, psychologist, and author who transformed his battle with depression into impactful change. As founder of SaferPlace Africa and member of Nigeria Mental Health, he combines advocacy, writing, and psychology to break stigma across Africa, earning recognition as NAPS Mental Health Advocate of the Year (2022 & 2023).

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Photo Credits: Prince Nnanna Daniel

Book Review: I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Se-hee

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 10:42:50 GMT

In her therapy memoir, author Baek Se-hee makes no pretense or exaggeration. She hopes to share her conversations with her therapist in a vulnerable account of what it means to know yourself better. Kritika Narula reviews the book that overcame her skepticism of therapy memoirs.

Cover Image Credits

“What’s it like being in therapy?” More often than not, when people ask this question, they are looking for a story in the answer. They are looking for a narrative. Something that makes for a good story, with a breakthrough moment that takes the limelight. In reality, however, therapeutic settings are hardly dramatic.

I have been in and out of psychotherapy for over 5 years now. And my only point of reference for what therapy was supposed to be like was a few pop culture depictions here and there. Grey’s Anatomy brought in a psychologist when the characters lived through a deadly mass shooting. There was the highly problematic Dr. Reisman in Big Little Lies. Realistic portrayals of therapy were hard to come by in mainstream pop culture until a few years ago.

So, when a therapy memoir went viral, I felt just slightly uncomfortable. Often, therapy can seem like a nebulous concept to explain. For people who have been in therapy for a while, it is hard to imagine the blank canvas they started with, now that they have verbalized so many of their previously unacknowledged emotions. For those just starting out, the blank canvas means they don’t really know what to expect from the process.

And how your healing process unfolds can look different for each person, but it is rarely a big climax or dramatic moment of change. You may have an ‘aha’ moment, but that’s just the beginning of a healing journey where you have more information about yourself. The realizations, the changes, and the epiphanies grow slowly in the space you and your therapist create. You use the therapy space as a microcosm for the world, where you practice embracing all your emotions. So, I didn’t want to read another account of the therapy experience that favored the dramatics.

The title of Baek Se-hee’s book particularly intrigued me, though. The tteokbokki reference reminded me of all the times I have wanted to give up on a goal, but still had an external point of reference that I wanted to stay for. In an email to The Sunday Times , Baek shares , “I was thinking of planning my own death, but I got hungry and ate tteokbokki. I felt guilty thinking that I could still eat tteokbokki when I wanted to die, yet it felt like such a natural thing to do.”

And this is a good glimpse into the rest of the book. To my delight, it didn’t dramatize or exaggerate. Just like the tteokbokki reference, it made me chortle at times. As someone who finds her sorrow definition-defying, it also made me feel seen and heard.

We all have emotions

Baek opens the story of her therapy experience with an earnest question, “Why are we so bad at being honest about our feelings? Is it because we’re so exhausted from living that we don’t have time to share them?” As anyone stepping into a therapist’s office will tell you, the first realization in therapy, for many people, is about the validity of our emotions.

We stop thinking of our emotions as a natural response only when they are either dismissed, invalidated, or belittled at some point in our lives. And the initial sessions often force us to unlearn this tendency. Just like Baek, we learn that all emotions carry information about us. They are opportunities to learn more about ourselves. Later in the book, Baek focuses on her self-esteem, diving deeper into what makes or breaks it. It is one of the gifts of therapy — it gives you the permission to explore what makes you who you are.

Lingering sadness

If I had to point out one reason this book merits a place in your reading list, it is because of the context. What made Baek seek therapy wasn’t a life-altering event or a sudden loss, but rather a mundane genre of sadness, something she defines as a “rotting on the inside, where the rot is this vague state of being not fine and not devastated at the same time.”

We all go in and out of funk in tandem with life’s ups and downs. But some people embrace the lows a little too closely. Her experience of lingering sadness resonates with me. She describes how she accepted that she was a little sadder than everyone else from a young age. She also shared the tense, restrictive circumstances at her home and in her family.

She remarks, “I let my world grow darker and darker,” and the honesty in this conversation shines through. Therapy spaces let you share your feelings and thoughts without sugarcoating anything. It doesn’t have to sound appetizing. It is not supposed to be edited. Once again, your sessions help you practice being authentic in the real world.

It takes a lot of courage to admit something like this: “To me, sadness is the path of least resistance, the most familiar and close-at-hand emotion I have. A habit that has encrusted itself into me everyday.” It takes far more courage to be curious about this complicated feeling.

An honest glimpse into the healing process

Baek’s account is a reminder of how imperfect the healing process can be. Previously, therapists have talked about the imperfection of the process in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (by Lori Gottlieb) and in Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before (by Dr Julie Smith). But to hear the client’s perspective was refreshing. What people don’t often tell you about therapy is how much of the healing work takes place in the outside world. Therapy equips us with the tools needed to live authentically, and we then step out into the world with those tools to build that authentic life. Therapy is also an extremely exhausting process. As Baek shares candidly, therapy reflections bring our contrariness to the surface, “That human beings are three-dimensional is perhaps my favourite thing to say. But it is also likely the last thing I will remember in a bad moment.”

The author writes prefacing the novel, “I doubt I could ever again be as candid in a book as I was in this one.” And when you sit through this simple but meticulous account of her conversations with her therapist, you understand why.

Author Bio:

Kritika Narula is a writer, journalist, content marketer from Delhi, India. You can find her on Instagram and Threads , and on her website .

Dispatches from PostCode: The Therapist’s Guide to the (Social Media) Galaxy

Mon, 05 May 2025 18:07:25 GMT

Tanmoy Goswami, mental health writer and founder of Sanity brought together speakers from the therapy ecosystem for discussions around the use of social media in the field.

How do you feel when you see your therapist on social media? If you’re a therapist, how do you feel about doubling up as a content creator? It isn’t far-fetched to imagine that many clients/patients today discover or meet their therapists on social media. How exactly are mental health professionals navigating this additional dimension of their work?

I recall the early days of mental health social media, when there was a sudden proliferation of mental health creator accounts, mostly advocates and lived-experience experts sharing their journeys in the hope of finding community, offering inspiration, or gathering support. Destigmatisation was the primary call to action from these champions and advocates. Campaigns and events were pushing us to talk about our mental health struggles. When celebrities spoke about it, they were made poster boys (or poster people) for the cause.

Twitter used to be a platform we could still use as a collective mobilisation tool, and the media were asked to report on mental health issues sensitively. Talking about mental health was the first step, using the right words when doing so, the next. On the corollary, we saw the emergence of therapist accounts. (This wave brought in psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and charities/collectives). Qualified people with degrees in human psychology and academic expertise in human behaviour offering you the tools and vocabulary to bridge the huge emotional expression gap that hitherto existed. The flavour of the content was “empowering with information.” You could identify with the situations a therapist was describing. It gave you the words to talk about your experience. It normalised the idea of sitting with a therapist and deciphering your emotional patterns.

But social media content creation has never stayed static. Algorithms are constantly tweaked in favour of one element over another, features discarded at the whims of algorithm monopolies. Suddenly, videos became the staple diet of the internet, chronological feeds were discarded in favour of a discovery-driven experience, and more recently, hashtags have been made redundant. The pressure to stay relevant, in light of everything being so transient, overpowered the original mission. Now you needed to stick to a posting schedule, feed the algorithm timely, prepare content calendars. Comment on the viral post doing the rounds. Have a polarising opinion on everything that’s being talked about. The algorithm likes when you bait people into watching your videos. Write sensational hooks.

We might have overcompensated: the ecosystem did such a good job of filling in the information gaps and invaded so many feeds that therapyspeak became a thing. Several psychologists came under scrutiny for their content. A concern that author Amanda Montell has also addressed in her book The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality. Words like trauma and abuse were being used irresponsibly to describe events and experiences. Therapists became influencers .

It’s a relatively recent development, and as such, there have been few conversations beyond scandalous concerns. Can the industry and academic fields decide on a code of conduct to create contours on what’s acceptable and what’s not when it comes to therapists’ social media presence?

PostCode Unconference

On April 12, 2025, 17 voices from peer circles, media, therapy and the startup world, and around 200 participants came together for PostCode, a first-of-its-kind online interdisciplinary learning forum for therapists navigating social media ethics and best practices, organised by Tanmoy Goswami, mental health writer and advocate and founder of Sanity , an independent mental health storytelling platform. Goswami shared in his initial concept behind the event, “ Freud may have squirmed at therapists turning into influencers. But in 2025, that orthodoxy is passé. Therapists are ruling social media. So much that some want to quit practicing therapy altogether and become full-time content creators …At the same time, especially post-COVID, social media helped mental health professionals get much-deserved public recognition and expand their careers beyond their clinics. But what started as a warm, fuzzy corner of the internet is now beset with thorny questions. As mental health content by therapists exploded on TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn, along came a bunch of ethical crises. ”

The forum wanted to address the knotty and needling questions around how therapists and other mental health professionals utilise and leverage social media platforms to talk about their field, to improve access to mental health information and resources, and to do all of this while upholding client privacy.

Ethics Versus Algorithm

The first panel of the day, titled “Ethics versus the Algorithm,” featured Smriti Joshi, Chief Psychologist at Wysa, and Snigdha Samantray, Clinical Psychologist and Digital Mental Health Expert, both of whom have extensive experience since the early days of digital mental health.

When asked to explain the algorithm through metaphors, they likened it to “an overly eager receptionist with memory issues and people-pleasing tendencies” or a “magician performing a trick trying to hoodwink you by predicting your actions,” both comparisons receiving a virtual chuckle from the audience. When discussing algorithms, it is also essential to recognise that the fundamental principles and concepts of human behaviour (reinforcement, operant conditioning, dopamine, and the reward loop) are central to the functioning of these algorithms. Algorithms, however, don't understand nuance.

The benefits of digital mental health were laid out: many people can’t make it to physical therapy rooms, whether due to cost, geography, or stigma. The virtual format has made it possible for them to access therapy sessions, and in many cases, made it affordable to do so too. Which is all the more reason for professionals to apply the same clinical depth and ethics in the therapy room.

When they stepped into the digital mental health space, the panellists knew they were treading choppy waters. What may have started in the pre-pandemic period as a novel means of accessing mental health teleservices became a norm, and as Snigdha remarked, “Digital mental health was not a choice, it was a tide.”

When mental health professionals choose to have an online presence, they are also being perceived by their clients. Which brings us to another critical question: how should therapists conduct themselves online?

How does my social media account make you feel?

When your therapist is actively talking about their work on social media, how does that make you feel? Content creation, especially in this space, cannot be untouched by politics. Would you stop seeing your therapist if you find out that their political beliefs don’t align with yours?

Let’s flip the narrative and address the mental health professionals. If you are a therapist, would you censor your political views to prevent backlash or double down on them? Would you keep churning content and engage with every viral moment to keep the algorithmic beast happy?

In the sessions, “Whose story is it anyway? The boundaries of ‘knowledge sharing’ on social media” featuring Dr Hvovi Bhagwagar, Founder, Manashni, and Anindita Chatterjee, Creator, The Poetry Room, and “Investigating your ‘why’ as a therapist on social media” featuring Mukti Shah, Psychotherapist in private practice; Shannon Fernandes, Founder, CogVerge; Snigdha Mishra, Founder, Lifesurfers Wellness Foundation; Alekhya Velidanda, Creator, The Trade of Therapy, these dilemmas were discussed.

One of the early questions behind PostCode was this: The trend of sharing patient stories for the sake of knowledge creation – can this ever be kosher, even with consent?

The exchange of patient stories through case studies, discussed in private academic settings, and/or anonymised and published in scholarly journals, has all been instrumental in pushing the field ahead. But a story shared on the ephemeral social media does not serve the same purpose. Yet, there are no guidelines prohibiting therapists from doing so. They should not, but no guardrails are stopping them from doing so, only their self-imposed ethics as a content creator or extension of their professional ethics as a therapist into the social domain.

At the same time, as discussed in another panel, the emergence of the #TherapistCommunity on social media platforms has scaffolded therapists against bait content or sensationalist takes. Finding fellow therapist-content-creator hybrids offers a reprieve from what can feel like a vortex on social media. Therapists, after all, are also human beings.

Back to the question of safeguarding client privacy and upholding confidentiality and ethical conduct in the client-therapist relationship. From the therapist’s side, this requires an inquiry into their reasons for being on social media: self-expression, community, information dissemination, or marketing for their therapy business. The “why” behind a social media presence was discussed at length in the panel. Therapists need to combat temptations in the disguise of reasons, yes, as mentioned before, algorithms tend to favour sensational content over nuance, they thrive off polarised views, but therapists need to be conscientious about the posts they make. The template of “listicles” has, for better or for worse, translated into the short-form video media, but it runs a very real risk of reducing a complex, nuanced conversation into a series of bullet points or steps.

To that end, psychologist Arjun Gupta also offered a workshop with actionable tools to help therapists define their content goals and curate content mindfully.

What mental health content do we need? Can it be joy?

A crowd favourite panel of the day, 'Centring Narratives of Recovery, Agency, and Joy in a Broken World', host-moderated by Bakul Dua, Head of Programmes, India Mental Health Alliance, and Sukhada Chaudhary, Vice President, Community and Content, Rang De, offered much-needed levity in the discourse. Mental health storytelling need not always be about unpacking dark experiences, the serious stuff, or profound solemnity. Humans often find humour to get through their daily lives, and as such, this humour should be reflected in our content.

Joy gets a bad rep very soon in mental health content, often within reason. Between inspiration porn, toxic positivity, wellness influencers, and LinkedIn soothsayers, joy got a terrible name somewhere. But we need to claim joy for a complete human experience. “Memes,” for example, Bakul remarked, “are a portal to depth.” She adds, “They’re a means of metabolising life rather than escaping it. No one is above a good joke.”

It echoes what we hear from many marginalised groups. The stories about marginalised identities often focus on their pain and suffering. Stories of their joy, then, feel rebellious. Micro-celebrations or small wins were highlighted as a significant part of recovery, and as such, should be acknowledged in the documented versions of our journey.

Attendee’s Note

Sitting across from my therapist in her cabin, I have often wondered if she understands how social media (an occupational hazard for me as an independent professional, a creative freelancer) influences our lives, professional identities, and social (or even financial) capital. My curiosity takes me places, and I am not above admitting that I have looked up my therapist online. Upon finding that her Instagram account was set to private, my immediate reaction was one of relief, and as I registered that, I was shocked. I’m not an algorithmic prude; in fact, I am the exact opposite of that. My work revolves around helping people establish their personal brands and optimise their online marketing engines. Why the reaction, then? On the one hand, I find it affirming to see therapists in the trenches alongside me, and on the other hand, I appreciate having a low-key therapist, a nod to the slippery slope that is content creation by therapists.

I’m sure of one thing: If my therapist were extremely online, I would want them to acknowledge the shades of grey where the mental health content ecosystem operates and to be an active participant in the discussions that this edition of PostCode has highlighted.

Sanity by Tanmoy is an independent, reader-funded and ad-free mental health storytelling platform run by Tanmoy Goswami. This blog talks about the first edition of PostCode held in April 2025 .

Author Bio:

Kritika Narula is a writer, journalist, content marketer from Delhi, India. You can find her on Instagram and Threads , on BlueSky , on Twitter , and on her website .

Fellowship Diaries: GULI on World Mental Health Day!

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 21:07:08 GMT

This World Mental Health Day, GenMH sponsored GULI's powerful Mental Health Sensitization Seminar at Egerton University Main Campus.

On October 10, 2024, Egerton University came together to recognize World Mental Health Day with a powerful Mental Health Sensitization Seminar at the Main Campus. Organized by Growing Up Liking It (GULI) and under the esteemed patronage of Prof. Charles M'Erimba, the event welcomed an amazing turnout of 368 students and staff, all eager to learn, share, and grow.

We were privileged to have the support and presence of Dr. Japhet Muthamia, Dean of Students, along with representatives from various departments, including the Medical Department, Directorate of Linkages and Collaborations, Vice Chancellor’s Office, and Directorate of Marketing and Resource Mobilization. The seminar’s diverse lineup offered fresh perspectives on mental health, sex education, self-esteem, and holistic wellness. Notable speakers like Dr. Justus Nondi and Mwalimu Michael Gacohi engaged the audience, sparking meaningful conversations and inspiring actionable steps toward better mental health.

The event was made possible by many university leaders and partner organisations. Their dedication to mental health awareness is truly appreciated, and the GULI team is grateful to everyone who joined hands to make this seminar a success! From insightful talks to engaging discussions, each attendee left with valuable insights and a stronger commitment to prioritize mental wellness.

A Special Thank You to Our Partners & Sponsors

This impactful day wouldn’t have been possible without the support of university leaders, departments, and esteemed sponsors:

Prof. Isaac. O. Kibwage, PhD, HSC - Vice Chancellor, Egerton University

⁠Dr. Japheth M. Mburugu - Dean of Students, Egerton University

⁠Prof. George Owuor - Center Leader, CESSAM

⁠Prof. Nancy W. Mungai - Coordinator, TAGDev 2.0

⁠Prof. Alexander Kahi - Center Leader, Co-ELIB

⁠Mr. Kennedy Maina - Branch Manager, Equity Njoro

Jacklyn Schess - Generation Mental Health

Breaking the Silence on Suicide Prevention - A reflection

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 11:20:36 GMT

On 30th September 2024, Generation Mental Health hosted a powerful webinar on suicide awareness and prevention, bringing together twenty participants with unique perspectives on mental health. The session, though intimate, resonated deeply, offering participants a space to discuss the critical role of media in shaping public perception of suicide, and how narratives of hope and recovery can drive change. It was an event that highlighted the importance of dialogue, community, and the responsibility we all share in promoting mental well-being.

Tanmoy emphasised that media organisations have a profound responsibility to shift this narrative. By focusing on stories of survival, resilience, and preventive actions, rather than just reporting the tragic losses, the media can foster hope and reduce stigma. Western media’s portrayal of mental health often sidelines issues prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, perpetuating a cycle of overmedicalization without addressing the social contexts that drive these struggles. This call for more localised, sensitive reporting struck a chord with the participants, reinforcing the need for media to become a vehicle for positive change.

But there was also hope in his words. He spoke of recent successful campaigns in India, where factual, responsible reporting on suicide has shifted the public conversation, helping people understand that suicide is preventable. It is these positive, constructive stories that we need to amplify, Tanmoy urged, and as communities, we must hold the media accountable for harmful reporting while celebrating their progress.

John’s presentation on using suicide recovery stories as a tool for advocacy provided a profoundly humanizing element to the webinar. He spoke to the power of storytelling – how sharing one's journey through despair, recovery, and healing can inspire others, foster understanding, and drive societal change. This idea of hope and resilience contrasted the often tragic portrayal of suicide in the media, offering a more balanced and empowering narrative.

John’s insights were particularly moving for those in attendance. He reminded us that sharing these stories is not just about advocacy, but about creating a sense of belonging and hope for others who may feel isolated in their struggles. His words underscored the value of using lived experience as a beacon of hope and a tool for collective healing.

Perhaps the most heartwarming aspect of the webinar was the sense of community it fostered. Attendees were not just passive listeners; they were active participants, offering insights, asking thoughtful questions, and sharing feedback. Together, we explored how communities can work to promote constructive messages in the media. By giving feedback to news outlets, we can collectively ensure that mental health is reported with the care and dignity it deserves.

It was an event that left us with hope – hope for better media representation, for stronger communities, and for more inclusive conversations around mental health . The suicide prevention webinar was a powerful reminder that together, we can change the narrative.

Fellowship Diaries: GULI Club at Egerton University, Kenya

lilydia34@gmail.com (Lydia Bennett-Li) — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 19:00:31 GMT

On 11th November, GenMH University Mental Health Fellow, Gakii Mwithali, organised a hugely successful mental health training session attended by over 350 students of Egerton University in Kenya.

The event was hosted by GULI Club and sponsored by GenMH, and focussed on the following topics:

Mental Health Literacy;
Sexual harassment and its implication on mental health among the youth;
Contraception among the youth and its implications and;
Effects of FGM on mental health among the youth.

We asked Gakii why sessions like this are so important in the Kenyan university setting:

"Challenges of managing mental conditions in Kenya include low awareness, limited treatment options and implied costs of treating mental illnesses. More information about access and utilization of mental health services is critical in improving mental health outcomes among the youth.

Although depression is a common health problem and has been shown to have detrimental effects on the students’ studies, few studies in Kenya have addressed the mental health problems in Kenyan universities."

To address this awareness and resource gap, Gakii and GULI Club aimed to sensitise Egerton students to adopt a mental health care-seeking attitude towards fell students and to encourage students to engage in creating awareness and mental health advocacy.

We are grateful to have been able to support such an important youth-led event, and we look forward to seeing more events and activities from Gakii and GULI Club in Kenya!

Well done to all those involved in organising the event, and a big thank you to the speakers and attendees for creating such an engaging and interactive event!

Low cost ways to prioritise your mental health

lilydia34@gmail.com (Lydia Bennett-Li) — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 19:02:46 GMT

The current economic climate has had a significant impact on mental health. Lasting impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, along with increasing global instability have exacerbated existing mental health inequalities, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. It's essential to prioritize mental health during these difficult times by seeking support, practicing self-care, and staying connected with others.

However, looking after your mental health doesn't have to be expensive. Here are some low-cost or free ways to prioritize your mental well-being:

Spend time in nature: From a short walk in your local park, to a weekend camping trip, taking a break from technology to spend some time in nature has been shown to reduce stress and promote feelings of wellbeing.
Find new ways to be active: Exercise has numerous benefits for mental health, including reducing stress and anxiety. It can also be a great way to meet new people. You don't need an expensive gym membership; a simple walk, jog, or yoga session can make a significant difference.
Practice mindfulness: Mindfulness techniques, such as meditation or deep breathing exercises, can help reduce stress and promote emotional refection. There are numerous free resources online, including guided meditation apps or videos on YouTube.
Connect with others: Social connections are essential for mental health. It can be difficult to find time for friends and family in an increasingly online world. However, making time to go for a picnic with friends or joining a local social group can make a significant positive impact on your mental health.
Prioritise sleep: Lack of sleep can contribute to feelings of anxiety and depression. Prioritize getting enough sleep each night by establishing a consistent sleep routine and limiting screen time before bed.
Volunteer: Volunteering is a great way to meet like-minded people, give you an feeling of purpose and meaning, and also increase your self confidence. Consider volunteering with an organisation in your local community or even starting your own organisation/initiative!

Looking after your mental health doesn't have to be expensive. By prioritizing self-care and making small changes to your daily routine, you can improve your mental well-being without breaking the bank.

Relationships are a lot like gravity: The beginning of Evolved Relationships

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 21:10:41 GMT

Birth is not where creation begins. Evolved Relationships as an idea was conceived in the early months of 2022.

Before I get into the creation story, let me tell you a little bit about Evolved Relationships. In its simplest form, Evolved Relationships will give you a relationship coach who will support you as you learn the skills to connect more deeply with your partner. Our methods combine a mix of live and asynchronous coaching with a focus on learning skills such as resolving conflicts, communicating effectively, setting healthy boundaries, among others.

Where did it all begin?

I was still a postgraduate student at t he time, studying Counselling Psychology at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in India. After spending close to 5 years on education development for the marginalised in India (two years of which I was a public school teacher), a move to mental health and psychology felt natural and strangely easy. This was because my time in education made one thing painfully clear to me - the links between mental health and achievement are not to be taken lightly. The two are strongly, positively correlated and bidirectionally impacted. As a Teach For India Fellow working in some of the most impoverished communities of the country, I experienced these linkages way too vehemently to not be affected by them. My students who came from stable, safe homes were most often the ones who showed the highest academic progress (or at the least the potential to grow). They were eager to learn and constantly at an advantage to access and make use of the opportunities provided to them. On the other hand, students who came from homes marked with poverty and abandonment struggled emotionally and hence also academically. They’d break into fights way too often, have trouble regulating themselves and were absent from school very frequently. Evidence from neuroscience explains this remarkable difference in behaviour based on the state of your mental health reasonably well. To be able to access higher level areas of cognition, it is fundamental to ensure that the individual is in a calm and well-regulated state of mind. To learn anything new, you must first feel safe and loved.

Having experienced this firsthand, my initial curiosity towaÍrds mental health and wellbeing soon became a serious professional interest. Having no prior formal experience or education in the field, I decided to start as a student. The chance to immerse myself in the theories of mind and behaviour gave me inexplicable joy. Intentionally practising active listening, empathy and meaningful challenging towards clients reaffirmed my choice to become a mental health practitioner. I had never before felt so at home than I felt in the classrooms of TISS where the only thing that mattered were the clients we were going to serve.

A classmate of mine, Prathamesh Kulkarni and I were eager to start applying our counsellor training. We decided to meet online every week and practice counselling techniques by taking turns to role play as each other’s clients Even as these calls progressed and the feedback we gave each other on our therapeutic skills deepened, little did I know that we were laying the foundation for a piece of work that would soon become our bread and butter in the days to come.

Why Evolved Relationships?

Both of us grew up seeing unhappy marriages all around us. My then classmate and now co-founder, Prathamesh at 34 tells me that more than 70% of his circles are people who are already divorced or in the process of getting there soon. I myself can count the number of people who I know to be happily married on a single hand. Marriage as an institution is being challenged like never before given how little it seems to offer besides a licence for having sex and children. Despite this, we continue to live in times where no ring at 30 is still seen as an underachievement. As I started piecing the different pieces of this puzzle together, what came into picture was a historic trend of people entering long term relationships without learning the skills necessary to sustain it. Matrimony is better described as a union of mutual compromises than as a union of love. Divorces in the US are as high as 50%. As income levels are rising and stigma around divorces reducing, other countries such as India are also witnessing a rise in divorce rates . Increasing divorce rates doesn’t mean that people weren’t unhappy before. What it means is that now they feel empowered and have the necessary resources to make decisions that can alleviate the unhappiness they experience in their relationships. Many couples we know and have heard of live separately because they don’t want to be together anymore yet want to avoid the hassle of court proceedings that come with filing for divorce.

When we tried to understand the nature of these break-ups, some things became pretty clear pretty quickly. Love alone can’t sustain a relationship. Love helps you get together, not stay together. For a relationship to be successful and lasting, you need more than love, you need skill.

The following situations might sound familiar. It is possible that you yourself could have experienced this in your past or present relationships. Couples get into screaming matches without knowing how they got there or what got them sÍtarted. People who couldn’t keep their hands off each other initially soon complain of being suffocated by their partner. They begin to feel that their relationship needs boundaries but don’t know how to draw them. Partners in a relationship are aware that they get triggered easily but feel at a loss when it comes to managing their emotions well. Despite having known each other for decades and probably having raised many children together, spouses wonder if they’re being too demanding or needy when expressing their needs. After drudging through their relationship for a few years, people realise that they no longer love or respect their partner and seek separation.

It’s likely that you identified with atleast one of the above issues because these relationship challenges are omnipresent. This means that there could be universal relationship laws governing the entire situation. Like in Physics. If everything your throw up is falling down, then maybe the phenomenon is not as random. If it is not as random, maybe there is a reason why it’s happening. If you know the reason, maybe the issue is solvable or at the least we could put the knowledge to good use, like try and send a rocket to the moon.

We had a similar epiphany about relationships as Newton did for gravity. We realised that the relationship issues that we see all around us are not random. There are clear patterns and root causes involved-personality traits, behaviour patterns, attachment style, compatibility, childhood experiences to name a few. Once we learnt about them, we realised that this problem has a potential solution - we could coach people to build relationship skills. We could help them learn how to manage fights better, we could teach them how to set and reinforce healthy boundaries, we could facilitate the rebuilding of respect and admiration they once had for their partner, we could aid them to become more aware of their triggers. Each of these skills hold great significance when it comes to the success of a relationship. Individuals have to make consistent investments in their relationship almost on a daily basis to refine their relationships skills over time. At Evolved Relationships, we’ve set out to teach people how to do this.

Our Offering

Our 10 weeks program is an opportunity for individuals to be handheld as they learn these 5 relationship skills - conflict resolution, boundary setting, self awareness, communication and emotional management. Our program varies from a traditional couples counselling model in many ways. For one, we work with individuals and not couples. It takes two to make a pattern but only one to break it. When one person starts showing up for themselves and their relationship, the relationship improves. This model forces the individual to take responsibility for their role in the relationship instead of blaming their partner for everything that is going wrong between them. The second difference is that our program lies at the intersection of education and counselling. We’re here to not just support you and handhold you but also to educate you. What underlies conflict? Why do you struggle being vulnerable even in the most intimate of relationships? Why is it so hard to get your point across to your partner sometimes? How to take space and give space in an intimate relationship? Before you do, you need to know. Once you know, you got to do. We work on both the knowledge and behaviour aspects of making a relationship work. The third difference is that it is a time-bound program. Our foundational program is 10 weeks long and each week focuses on a specific relationship skill. This encourages our clients to view their relationships issues also as solvable in a realistic timeframe. Of course, 10 weeks is only the beginning and prolonged success depends on practising these skills. The more you practise, the better you get at connecting with your partner.

Lastly, Evolved Relationships is a preventive relationship intervention. Usually couples go to counselling when the wounds start festering. By then there’s too much contempt for each other baked in that resolution becomes hard and tricky to achieve. This is also why many couples, despite going to counselling, eventually go their separate ways.

Our 10 weeks program is best suited for individuals who have just about realised that there is more than just love to making a relationship work. A near-perfect analogy is how a timely check when the smoke alarm goes off compares to all the firefighting needed when the house catches fire. When you start working your relationship early on, you reduce the chances of having to do any firefighting later on.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again - Relationships take more than love to work. They need skills and a good deal of effort. The fact about most effort-intensive tasks in life though is that the reward almost always makes up for the work you have to do. The path of least resistance might not be the wisest one to take if you’re looking for everlasting love.

About the author

Anju Joy is the Chief Programs Officer at Generation Mental Health. She is also the co-founder of Evolved Relationships . Anju is a Harvard certified mental health practitioner and a trained counsellor. Prior to her transition to the field of mental health, she has spent over 5 years working in education development in India. If you’d like to talk to her about your relationship, mental health or anything else, feel free to write to her at anju.grace.joy@gmail.com

The 2023 GenMH Conference: A reflection from the Chair

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 15:16:20 GMT

"looking back to what the team and I achieved, I could not be more proud of what we accomplished"

Generation Mental Health’s third annual conference: Youth Advocating for the Future of Mental Health. While it was certainly a lot of work, looking back to what the team and I achieved, I could not be more proud of what we accomplished.

The biggest challenge we faced was deciding how to host this year's conference. We had an idea of what a virtual, global conference looked like, but we didn’t know how to create a similar valuable conference at the University of Michigan. Through hard work and motivation, we did it! We delivered a two day event, the first day being a virtual event facilitated through Zoom conferencing, and the second being our very first in-person event on campus at the University of Michigan.

Having experienced both the virtual and in-person conferences, I have found that both were really effective in strengthening a sense of community among youth mental health advocates. In every Zoom meeting – whether for a keynote, panel, or workshop – the speakers were engaged. Moreover, the audience asked questions and expressed genuine interest at every event. In particular, during the Climate Change and Mental Health Panel, we all participated in a discussion about how we have experienced climate change in our individual settings, and the impact that has had on our own mental health. Although as a group we spanned multiple geographic settings worldwide, we felt like a community as we spoke about our personal experiences and were able to be vulnerable with one another.

Similarly, during the in-person event, there was a strong sense of community as everyone who attended listened actively to each of our speakers and participated in powerful discussions. I especially enjoyed our conversation with Bear as he discussed his lived experience with incarceration and how that impacted his mental health. Though his speech would have been just as powerful on Zoom, the knowledge and sentiment that everyone is sharing space in the same room made this conversation all the more powerful.

Overall, being Generation’s Mental Health chair for the third annual conference, “Youth Advocating for the Future of Mental Health,” has been extremely rewarding. We were faced with many bumps in the road leading to the conference, but through teamwork, motivation, and passion for mental health, we were able to create a virtual and in-person community that is dedicated to mental health awareness and change.

Learning advocacy: five reflections after my summer internship

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 12:27:47 GMT

What is advocacy, what is it really?

I’d ask myself this every time I finished describing my summer internship at Generation Mental Health to my friends. I recognized the importance of the word on my tongue. Advocacy. Yet it felt elusive the more I thought about it, uncertain, and at times even, empty. Ad-vo-ca-cy , I’d repeat. To advocate, advocating, an advocate .

My Ukrainian parents didn’t seem to get the advocacy deal either, wholly confused by my talks of “defending” and “protecting” mental health—the best translations I could think of in Russian. Defend mental health how? they probed.

Conflating advocacy with activism, I pictured myself carrying placards in crowded marches, only to remember that my main assignment this summer was to design a learning curriculum, and that my work would be entirely virtual. I’d have to figure it out soon, I knew, for my job not only required advocating, but also teaching advocacy to others.

Twelve weeks later, I’m here, having spent the summer designing an advocacy course for youth, folks with lived experience , and community organizations interested in campaigning and awareness raising in mental health. I researched fascinating mental health advocacy and recovery programs around the world. I was able to personally connect with one of the founders of United for Global Mental Health, the first organization to campaign for mental health on a global scale, who is a GenMH team member. I had long conversations with my boss, a chemical engineer turned teacher turned advocate and psychologist-in-training, about striving toward linguistic diversity and the demand for services in Malayalam in southern India. I read about inspirational young people who are changing conversations about psychological wellness, and encountered distinct and equally radical approaches to organizing. In this time, I really started to grasp advocacy.

My early intuitions about advocacy weren’t wrong, but they were certainly incomplete; Advocacy, I’ve come to realize, doesn’t end at “defending” or “protecting” something, or using your platform and privilege to demand change. As I reflect on my internship at GenMH, I’ve been considering advocacy through these five frames:

Advocacy as education

A major part of advocacy is information sharing and resource distribution, whether that means educating others about current mental health legislation , designing informative toolkits , or making mental health knowledge accessible and organized via powerful search engines . Advocacy requires empowering others to act, connecting people, and fostering collaboration. Through fellowships and virtual courses , like the one I developed this summer, interested advocates and individuals with lived experience will gain research, outreach, and other essential capacity skills. Knowing my role as a young educator helped me increasingly see myself as a mental health advocate.

Advocacy as methodology

Researching, brainstorming, theorizing, sharing, and planning— these are only a handful of steps underlying the logic of advocacy. Once I familiarized myself with concepts like Theory of Change, stakeholder analysis, and needs analysis, I began appreciating the formulaic thinking that guides advocates and helps them ground, specify, and communicate their ideas. An advocacy mindset is honed through repetition and practice, answering hyperspecific questions, and always thinking ahead. Problem solving, my boss once told me, was the biggest similarity she identified between mechanical engineering and mental health advocacy.

Advocacy as voice

Beyond the elevator pitch, advocacy is an ask or a set of asks. It is also writing, emailing, petitioning, writing scripts, and telling stories— your story. Kind and inclusive language is important. For the lone advocate, vulnerable discussions in safe spaces are, too.

Advocacy as vision

I often think about what famous American Civil Rights activist Grace Lee Boggs said: “People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative.” Advocacy is precisely this radical thinking and serious imagination, which prove so difficult, they render people imobile. When creating her infographic A Day In a Life: Imagining a Country without Racial Gaps , American storyteller Joanna Carrasco touches on the complexities of visionary thinking, in a blogpost : “I had trouble pushing myself to imagine what the most fruitful life … could even look like … It was difficult to imagine prosperity that is not often showcased or given attention.” Successful advocates are creative thinkers who keenly capture our world and incessantly strive to enact those visions of a better world .

Advocacy as the sum of small things

A late night email from our CEO, asking to reschedule our meeting because of insomnia and anxiety. A coworker sharing their struggles with vicarious trauma from this line of work. A postscript that begins with “In an effort to prioritise self care.” A supervisor reminding me they are always a WhatsApp call away. These tiny acts of honesty and self-advocacy are where we start.

written by Sarah Eisenberg, Generation Mental Health Summer Intern, 2022

Money Makes The World Go Round: On The Intersections Of Your Bank Balance And Mental Wellbeing

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 11:46:36 GMT

Some thoughts on how money affects mental health, wellbeing, and quality of life.

Girls That Invest, the Instagram account of an Investing Education Podcast that shares financial wisdom and hacks, recently shared this reel/TikTok video : a woman is wondering & wishing she didn’t get anxiety from making everyday financial choices, like purchases. The behaviour is explained as a trauma response to not having financial stability in your childhood or formative years. It’s what people refer to as a “scarcity mindset.”

It brings to the fore a narrative we don’t often talk about in our conversations about mental healthcare solutions. Your financial standing determines — or at the very least, influences — your mental health & wellbeing. But more importantly, your dynamic with money is a learned response. How you react when your salary hits your bank, whether you choose to invest, splurge or budget (and how you budget) is not a black & white response. Just because someone chooses to invest in a variety of financial instruments does not make them savvy. Just because someone chooses to spend a majority of the amount right around payday does not mean they are financially foolish. These behaviours, instead, are loaded with years of observation, absorption, and financial traumas.

What this also prompts conversation about is this fact: when you come from an unstable financial background, your relationship with money is fractured in ways more than one, in ways that may not be as obvious as a retail therapy-style stress response.

We talk about scarcity versus abundance mindset like it’s a millennial hack. It’s not.

Very simply, when a scarcity mindset dominates, our relationship with money is dictated by fear rather than fulfilment. And consequently, that leads us to make poorer purchase decisions and injures our saving habits, among other financially damaging actions.

On the other hand, an abundance mindset is based on the belief that there’s plenty out there for everyone: money, opportunities, resources or love. These resources are not finite; they do not deplete if one person has more of them. This way of thinking allows you to be open to possibilities, options, and alternatives because you don’t feel insecure about losing out on their limited reserves. For instance, we all know that if you don’t make some investment in your business, you will not be able to grow it. A scarcity mindset will tell you that money should not be spent and that marketing expenses are frivolous. A healthy, abundance mindset will push you to make judicious investments and in turn, reap rewards in exponents of what you spend.

Now, my question to you is simple: how do you expect someone born in a financially tumultuous household to feel comfortable spending money, even if they are earning decently enough to sustain themselves now? How can you expect someone who grew up eating out only once a year to suddenly get comfortable with the idea that money will never run out, even if you are allowed to spend and #TreatYourself. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pinches hard, but even harder pinches the default response of hesitation in making purchases. On the other hand, the response could be another extreme: spending in alarming quantity because of the fear that the resources available today may not be available tomorrow.

The difference between a healthy financial relationship and an unhealthy one is this fear. It’s what I like to call a financial cushion, which I learnt is referred to as generational wealth. When you come from a family that had even an average flow of consistent money, your relationship with money is healthy: your mother teaches you to be frugal, your father leads by example. Then, one fine weekend, both your parents decide it’s a day you are allowed to indulge: a better ice-cream parlour, a high-rated restaurant, branded shoes instead of mass-market ones…it teaches you to reward yourself every now and then. For those without resources, none of these experiments pans out. For someone living from hand to mouth, these lessons have no place or priority.

Access to decent financial resources can prevent suicides.

For those wondering in disbelief, I’m not exaggerating or hyperbolizing here. I come bearing proof. For the purposes of this argument, let’s time travel to Brazil in 2003. The then-president, Lula da Silva introduced a conditional cash transfer programme called the Programa Bolsa Família (PBF). The conditions for cash transfer included practices like sending children to school, or timely & proper vaccination of children. The idea was to reward actions that feed into a cycle of socio-economic health and, by extension of these transfers, wealth. This led to a drop in the number of people living below the poverty line.

A study by a group of global health and medicine experts investigated the effect of Bolsa Familia, the world’s largest conditional cash transfer programme, on suicide rates in some parts of the Brazilian population. Here’s what it found:

“Individuals who were BFP beneficiaries had a 61% lower suicide rate than non-beneficiaries. While there is no ultimate guarantee that the association is causal, the robustness of the findings strongly suggests this claim can be made. Cash transfer programmes play an important role in poverty reduction, and improvements in the beneficiaries` well-being, potentially protecting individuals from becoming a victim of suicide. These findings are important considerations when designing suicide prevention strategies. They could be especially important when the upcoming financial recession will place millions below the poverty line and cause rising unemployment levels, with associated adverse consequences.”

Another study explained that higher minimum wages are linked to reduced suicide rates. While suicide is a layered, complex policy issue, interventions like these can contribute immensely to reducing the alarming rates. In order for people to flourish, they need to be shown, through actionable steps, that living isn’t going to be hard.

In simple words, when people are not combatting the strains of economic hardships, they are less likely to be driven into suicidal ideation. Sure, life throws challenges at us all. In the case of many such challenges, when people have financial resources to deal with the affliction, they are not driven to a psychological place of despair and dejection. Instead, they can allocate resources toward solving the issue at hand.

Besides, if you have the basic resources at your disposal, you can prevent a substantial number of such problems, if not all, in the first place. This is the unspoken grief my depressive episodes of 2016 were rooted in. When I first mustered the courage to reach out and seek therapy, I was in for a bitter reality check. Therapy is an expensive affair. Part of what prompted my decision to seek therapy was the distress caused by my financial situation. The rates at which quality, consistent therapy was available meant that I had a choice: either I can save money to salvage the financial turmoil I was in (read: I was trying to fund my education) or seek expensive therapy sessions that are normally a long-term investment, rarely relying on quick fixes if your therapist is any good. I wasn’t alone in this realisation, as multiple reports have shown.

Student debt also reportedly drives people to experience suicidal ideation. It's because debt can be a constant knife over your head. It is a slippery slope: your debt can become your entire identity. It can take over all the other aspects of your life, and govern and redirect all your resources and decisions. I know, because I’ve been there.

Financial hardship changes you as a person.

The knife of financial hardship cuts deep. If point 3 didn’t make it clear, it can alter how you view life. Optimism, then, is a function of your financial standing. In her fiercely honest account of therapy, I want to die but I want to eat Tteokbokki , Baek Sehee writes, “When life becomes something one just lives through, when the demands of survival take up all of our time and effort, leaving no strength for any other demands, and when time rushes by drying up or rotting whatever we have had to neglect, expecting someone to carry on being the same is truly too much of a burden.”

As if it's not enough I’m poor, the system is rigged to make it worse for me.

The failings of my life are actually failings of a system that refuses to acknowledge financial wellbeing as a major component of life quality and as a determinant of mental health support and knowledge available to a person.

Instead, the system sets poor people up for failure. At its worst, it accords the blame of poverty on the victim; at its best, it extends healthcare resources without practical access for the intended beneficiaries. Poverty deprives a person from having some crucial formative experiences that only come from socializing with others…all of which can come with hidden costs that financially functional families or households aren’t even counting.

Financial Wellbeing Doesn’t Just "Solve"; It Can Potentially Prevent Issues Altogether

For many sections of the population, financial independence and financial stability can be highly empowering, a strong force in swaying them towards hope. This is because financial well-being has a ripple effect. Being financially stable and sufficient directly implies that you can afford to tke risks, make mistakes, learn from them, and try again. For someone with no or limited resources, experimenting or taking risks just isn’t an option.

Our mental health does not operate in silos, it is very much impacted by our environments — physical, social, economic. If either of these environments is being disturbed by negative experiences, it can directly impact our mental well-being. Therefore, poverty, inequality, and discrimination place some people at a much higher risk compared to others not subject to these living conditions.

Cover Photo by micheile dot com on Unsplash

Written by Kritika Narula

Kritika Narula is an Advisor-Member of the Lived Experience Committee at Generation Mental Health. She’s a journalist and content strategist based in Delhi, India. She can be reached at @KritikaTweeting and @kritika.narula

For Me, Self-love And Healing Began At Home

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 10:13:08 GMT

Community played a vital part in healing, writes Ishita Tewari

We all have stories inside of us. A mix of happy and sad memories. Acceptance is a big part of these stories. As writers, we are often told to put down our emotions and feelings into writing, especially ones that we are unable to express verbally. So, today, I will try.

This is what my mental health journey has looked like: As a school kid, I was often told I was not good enough. I did not know how to react or what to make of these remarks. I had started to internalize these comments. I used to really believe that I wasn’t good enough, then. Self-doubt engulfed my mind. I was always anxious.

But I also believe, today, that I am the master of my mind. That’s what has brought me to the other side of fear. To the feeling that I am worthy and can make a difference. The 2020 lockdown was another trigger point that not only worsened these feelings of inadequacy but also made me question my identity. It was during this time I started taking therapy. Acceptability comes when you are ready for the change and I was: added to other triggers was loneliness and grief — the recent loss of a grandmother was hard to overcome.

One day, I hit the point of inflection. On 15th April 2020, I began a journey of self-love and started loving myself before anything. And at the core, the driving force was my actions for fitness. I made fitness an intentional part of my daily schedule. I meditated to connect with my inner-self. Yoga helped me learn emotional regulation.

Everything they say about emerging a stronger person from adversity is true. However, in this journey, we often neglect to mention the role of family and friends. They always had words of encouragement and motivation for me.

Even as a silent presence, they were steadfast through all my challenges, cheering me on my positive changes and steps, standing by my side to catch me if I fall. We don’t emphasize it strongly enough: community, family, friends…these groups make us whole as a person. When we know we can count on them when we have encouraging forces around, that’s when we begin to heal.

Alone, we can try to pick up the pieces. But we begin to heal when we have a safe space, a safe harbour in our people.

My journey to mental wellness would not be possible without the support of my closest allies.

Written by Ishita Tewari

Ishita Tewari has been working as a development communication practitioner for the last three years. Presently she is working with IPE Global as a Communication Specialist. She has done her master’s from Jamia Millia Islamia in Development Communication.

Featured Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Toxic Workplaces & Mental Health: Identifying the red flags

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 04:31:34 GMT

We spend a large part of our lives at work. Toxicity in the workplace can cause great detriment to your mental health, Edwin Mburu reflects.

I got my diagnosis about 7 years ago in 2015. Since then, I have been in a very good space mentally. Of course, there have been bumps along the way but these ups and downs have consistently made me more resilient.

I have come to appreciate how much control I have in my recovery journey. As a PWLE (Person With Lived Experience), being very intentional on how I safeguard my mental health has always been my number one priority. Recovery is a very personal journey. Everyone’s recovery looks different. However, as you progress in recovery one has to appreciate that some things are in your direct control while others are not. Understanding this key aspect in recovery can be a game-changer for most of us if not all.

Work, employment and lived experience

As a PWLE in formal employment, I spend a big chunk of my time at work. I believe this is the same case for most, if not all. How does your workplace affect your mental health? All workplaces have some levels of stress, which is not unheard of. Some level of stress is actually good. Eustress — or the positive form of stress — can actually motivate us to perform better and to stay proactive. However, if the thought of going to the office makes you feel repulsive, depressed, or even physically ill, then it is highly likely that you are working in a toxic workplace.

To put it in other words, a toxic workplace is one where employees find it difficult to work or progress in their careers due to the negative atmosphere created by coworkers, management, or the company culture itself.

Research in the UK shows a third of the employees have taken some time off work due to toxic work culture. Toxic workplaces can damage your self-esteem, relationships, finances and many other spheres of your life. Since your workplace can be such a crucial determinant of your wellbeing, it’s important to watch out for some tell-tale signs of toxicity.

Identifying workplace toxicity & its fixes

So how does one know that they are in a toxic work environment? What do you do if you find yourself in such a place? Have you noticed high turnover in your organization? If yes, then that is a sign that employees are realizing that the workplace is in dysfunction, leaving its employees with low to zero morale, thereby prompting them to search for better options. This in turn leads to further burnouts as the organizations then transfer the workload to the remaining, reduced staff who get overwhelmed both physically and emotionally with the tangible and intangible burden of work.

It is the sign of a healthy workplace that employees function at a pace that is sustainable and reasonable, rather than moving at break-neck speed and crashing when they hit a minor speed bump. We all possibly know at least one person — friends, family, or acquaintances — who has crashed in this manner.

Another indicator that all is not well at the workplace is the formation of cliques. These are a few individuals who speak or act under a secret “code” that directly or indirectly alienates other employees. What does this look like in action? The management might delegate prospective projects to certain groups of employees who are “loyal”. Cliques basically alienate certain employees who are deemed not fit in certain social, academic, and professional circles within the organizations. In extremes, this promotes discrimination and can greatly affect employees’ morale, productivity, self-esteem and most importantly, their mental health.

The lack of work-life balance

A toxic workplace has no work-life balance. In this day and age, we can’t downplay the role of having a balanced life. Do you find it hard to take leave? Are you always in a negotiation about when and how to take leaves? I know of situations where even new fathers were unable to take paternity leave due to “work”. In one scenario a new father was directed by the supervisor to take his paternity once “work pressure” reduces. Well, in short, the man never took his paternity leave, and I believe the child is actually in school now. If such incidences are the norm in your workplace, then you are probably in a toxic workplace. If you are expected to be on the clock all the time, responding to “urgent” emails even when on leave or over the weekends, then you are probably in a toxic workplace.

World Health Organization recently recognized burnout as a legit medical diagnosis. Even in light of this, we still find rampant cases in our workspaces that are burnout-related. There are three types of burnout namely: Frenetic, under-challenge and worn-out.

Frenetic or overload burnout occurs when employees put in a lot of work hours with the sole goal of achieving certain results despite feeling overwhelmed by the workload. Employees in this situation neglect their personal wellbeing and time to fully immerse themselves in work only to crash at some point.

Under-challenge burnout affects employees especially when they get no satisfaction from their work. A person at this stage will feel that the workplace doesn’t offer enough opportunities for their abilities. Work that is also monotonous will lead to employees experiencing this kind of burnout. This lowers the mood and morale of the employee and ultimately productivity.

Worn-out burnout occurs when one is mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted by their work. This happens after a long period of consistent work stress that leaves one resigned and disillusioned by having little to zero rewards for putting in the work.

There’s a lot that can be said about toxic workspaces. The fact is, if not addressed, the end results are detrimental to both individuals and organizations. If you are in such a situation, you can try to use the appropriate channels in the workplace to address this. If this doesn’t bear fruit — in most cases it doesn’t — then it’s time to think of an exit strategy. One has to carefully weigh their options and decision making has to be made consciously. Impulsivity at this point will only cause you more pain and anguish. Remember that your mental health is a priority and with that in mind you can plan accordingly. This might sound easier said than done and it is, but it can be done, it has been done and it’ll continue on in the future. Toxic workspaces need to be addressed and repaired with empathy and practical shifts in the work culture.

Edwin Mburu , GenMH Lived Experience Committee Member, found on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Edwin is a Lived Experience Expert. He’s the founder of Mentally Unsilenced and a blog about mental health by the same name. An accountant by profession, Edwin’s lived experience has seen him participate in various capacities in mental health organizations both at the local and international levels. Some of these organizations include GenMH, Global Mental Health Peer Network (GMHPN), The Stability Network, Time to Change global and PDO Kenya.

Edwin is currently involved as Co-Author in research on workplace interventions to reduce stigma by Wellcome Trust Foundation. Edwin is among 3 of the Experts by Experience (EBE) recruited to give insight into workplace interventions from a Lived Experience perspective

Features Image Credits: Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Lived Experience, Storytelling, and Mental Health: How can we be Agents of Change?

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 22:46:09 GMT

From November 19th-21st, we had the opportunity to attend Generation Mental Health's second annual conference – Global Mental Health: Agents of Change. Over these three days, we participated in various keynotes, panels, workshops, and mentorship opportunities from notable speakers worldwide.

On Saturday, November 20th, we (Enia and Francesca) met when we participated in the workshop ‘The Power of Sharing Your Story’ by the Healthy Brains Global Initiative (HGBI) Lived Experience Council. In this workshop, we engaged in several activities to answer the question: How can we, as people with lived experience, most effectively share our stories with others to advocate for change within the mental health space? The exercises ranged from coming up with a hypothetical six-word response to someone who asks you why you are an advocate for mental health, to spending two minutes speaking to everyone about why you want to share your story.

Although the HGBI Lived Experience Council advertised the workshop as a discussion on the power of sharing your story, so much more came out of it. We were given a space to get to know each other and be vulnerable together. Sharing your story or speaking about why you want to be an advocate can be scary – it was scary for me (Francesca). However, because we were all there to learn more and engage in the activities, we felt comfortable sharing our stories and speaking our truth.

However, we believe that one of the biggest takeaways from the workshop and the conference as a whole is that there is a desperate need for those with lived experience to be considered at a local and international level and to affect change in more impactful ways.

The workshop we attended highlighted the importance of empowering, building capacity, and a sense of ownership, so we can own our story, elaborate it, process it, and stand our ground. We came to realize that paper and pencil -or a keyboard- are some of the most powerful tools to learn about ourselves and share our perspectives and experiences with the world. Having the tools to own and communicate our stories can be part of a process of healing for ourselves because it can normalize and validate our experiences.

Empowerment is both individual and collective, especially when sharing lived experiences. We require both the linguistic know-how and personal resources as well as the emotional, psychological, and pragmatic support from the audience for this effort to be sustainable. Personal and collective narratives might make their way through -isms and phobias and ultimately the powers involved in narrative-setting. Sharing our stories is labor-intensive and can exacerbate our vulnerabilities; it can unveil difficult personal journeys and experiences and yet it is out of our grasp to convey their length and depth fully. It might make us feel vulnerable as we open up to others’ interpretations. But this is where stories can also be used to invite collaboration, support, change narratives, and gain allies. We can identify what is not spoken about and why, and speak with each other. To say that multiples are more than one, that one voice can be amplified, that one struggle is our struggle, even when its circumstances and uniqueness should be respected and given space.

One sentiment that the conference shared as a whole is that we need to advocate, hold space for each other and re-evaluate the way we think of who is an expert of what story and why, to create meaningful support and collaboration. When it comes to sharing, we also need others. During the workshop, we were all placed in a vulnerable space while sharing our stories because we felt exposed and vulnerable to an audience of which we knew little or nothing about apart from a collective interest in mental health. However, we all felt comfortable sharing because we were in a space where everyone was intentionally and explicitly reaching out to create a welcoming space where we respected each other’s vulnerabilities. Like during the workshop, we need to hold a space that supports people when they come forward with their stories because those who might ‘put themselves out there’ might feel a new sense of susceptibility in being visible, exposed, and vulnerable, not only then and there, but also later on. We need to make sure that the cost of coming forward isn’t a burden and that coming forward is okay, just as it is taking their time or not wanting to do so.

Overall, this conference is unique because beyond learning about current global mental health issues, we are learning what we can do to make a change. So, rather than leave the conference saying, “I learned a lot,” we are asking ourselves, “I learned a lot, now what can I do?”

Citations:

Image: https://www.calmsage.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/The-Power-Of-Storytelling-On-Mental-Health.jpg

My Wellbeing is Political: A Page from My Pandemic Diary

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 15:41:48 GMT

Anju looks back at the second wave of the pandemic in India & recounts the distress caused.

The first case of COVID-19 in India was confirmed in the third week of January 2020. It took about two months for the pandemic to take precedence over every other priority in the country, but it happened. The Prime Minister announced a nationwide lockdown limiting movement — and by extension life as we knew it — for an indefinite period of time. I was in a small village in Himachal Pradesh at the time of the announcement and felt lucky. I was safe, had the money to survive for the next few months and had a compatible company to alleviate total loneliness. In retrospect, my relief shouldn’t have been a factor of luck.

When your government is instituting a measure to curb a pandemic, your feelings of safety and security shouldn’t be left to chance. From behind the screen of my phone, I watched millions of migrant workers — who weren’t as lucky as I was — walking hundreds of kilometres back to their villages and how so many did not make it. I read about people gathering in huge crowds at railway stations desperate to go back to the safety of their homes. I saw them being sprayed with liquid from a disinfectant bottle while being forced to squat at places with questionable hygiene. Crammed together and stripped of all rights and respect, they waited to be spattered on before they were allowed to resume their journey. A friend who was travelling in Rajasthan called me the night after the impromptu lockdown was announced to tell me about how he was screamed at by the local police because an American (who could not get a flight back on time) accompanied him to the station. They had gone there to obtain permission from the police to stay in the locality until they could travel back. When other countries were planning and strategizing to prevent infections from rising, I read about my state sponsoring the demolition of protest sites that had emerged in late 2019 against the new citizenship law in India. The law denies illegal Muslim immigrants citizenship rights in India but grants it to immigrants from other religions.

In the wake of all of this, I felt scared. I felt an intense, visceral sadness. To date, that feeling’s not really left my body.

Six months later, I moved back to Delhi. The rate of spread had come down significantly. We did things that reminded us of the pre-COVID era. I stepped out for walks in the afternoons, ordered dinner on some nights, invited a few friends cautiously during weekend evenings. I did not find any governmental policy or regulation that I could attribute the slight improvement in my life to but I was happy nevertheless.

The second wave of COVID-19 hit that complacent ignorance hard. This is how I would paint that picture. I am at the beach. I can see my friends, family and many non-threatening strangers by the shore. We are all rendered immobile. Every surfacing crest makes us tremble. Who is going to be taken this time? The foamy green waters came real close, almost touching my toes many times before it mercifully receded only to return again a few seconds later. I mutely witnessed the massacre all around. When a friend lost his father, I couldn’t get out of bed for the next 3 days. When another lost his grandmother, I wept and sobbed for an hour after I hung up the phone. I hit stop midway while watching a documentary that showed two men sharing an ICU bed breathing in oxygen from a black cylinder. I read a few days later that oxygen supply had become a rationed commodity. A black market had sprouted overnight from scarcity of resources. Is this what wartime felt like?

Once upon a time (not very long ago), I travelled 2 hours on a weekday to eat biryani. I ate every mouthful of it with relish. Now, I wished for pill substitutes that could satiate the weak sensations of hunger I felt occasionally. I used to find trigger warnings in news broadcasts and social media unnecessary. During the months of April and May of 2021, even case numbers imploded in my head.

Vaccinations were supposed to alleviate the plight. We could ramp up our vaccination efforts and protect those still standing. But like a poor child who accidentally walks into a bright and promising toy store, I quickly realized that my folks can’t afford to buy me anything there. I saw wealthy democracies announce ambitious vaccination targets and roll out campaigns to encourage citizens to get inoculated. In India, we were gasping for air. I read about fatigued and suicidal doctors who couldn’t withstand the growing strain on the health system. 25 people died on a single day in a premier private hospital in the capital because of a lack of oxygen. In rural India, whole units at hospitals were catching fire because of risky handling of the same precious gas. International media roared about the plight of India and the inadequacies of the ruling government. Meanwhile in India, politicians and bureaucrats didn’t have a whole lot to say on the matter. No ambitious plans, not enough vaccinations, not enough relief measures, not even enough cremation or burial grounds .

Attachment research has shown that the relationship a child forms with their caregiver in their formative years is a huge predictor of the nature of their relationships in adult life. A child who feels nurtured and loved grows to become a secure adult. They are also seen to be more resilient in the face of trauma and grief. They learn how to adjust socially, cultivate empathy and disagree respectfully without compromising their sense of self. However children with a history of abandonment or neglect are not equipped with these highly essential tools to navigate life. When your pleas and cries are consistently ignored, you come to believe that your actions don’t make a difference. You trudge along directionless and lose the ability to distinguish between a threat and an encouragement. You either lash out at everything or withdraw from everything.

Having been a secure adult for most of my life, my withdrawn emotional response to the second wave of the virus made me feel like a stranger to myself. It made me wonder when a child becomes an adult, who replaces the positions in their lives that caregivers once held? It’s natural to displace some of those expectations of safety and security onto a friend, a partner or a pet. We seek refuge in them during times of grief - a difficult breakup, a debilitating diagnosis, or the death of a loved one. I’m beginning to think that it also gets displaced to our politics and to the institutions that give life to them. I felt neglected and abandoned by my government during the pandemic. I felt the leaders that I had elected into the hallowed hallways of the highest offices of the country didn’t care for my well-being. I felt nothing could be done and I had nowhere to go. The only thing left for me was to suffer silently till the pain goes away or until I learn how to numb it. And when I look around me, at others who have it much worse than I do, it pushes the mirror neurons in my brain to the verge of collapse.

The foundations of our resilience lie in the belief that we are valued, heard and understood. We often don’t realize it but institutions of power and authority have a deeply intimate role in enabling us to feel that this life we have is worth living.

Written by Anju Joy

Anju Joy is an aspiring mental health researcher and practitioner. She began a career in education development in 2016 with a focus on children from low socioeconomic backgrounds. She is also a Teach For India Fellow (Batch of 2016-18). Her experiences led her to realize the critical role that mental health plays in learning achievement, poverty alleviation and many other areas of development. Anju left her full-time position in education in 2020 and has since been on the pathway to pursue a career in mental health and well-being. Feel free to get in touch/write to her at anju.joy4757@gmail.com

I told the whole office I have schizophrenia. Here's what happened.

Sat, 22 May 2021 10:33:38 GMT

"People like us are dehumanized in the media a lot. So we want to begin by humanizing ourselves.”

“I have something I’ve wanted to say at work for a long time,” I begin. “I haven’t, because I’ve never heard of anyone ever doing this before, and part of me still can’t believe I’m about to do it. But it’s Mental Health Awareness Month, and I have something to say.”

Deep breath. Once I say it out loud, I can never take it back. Here goes nothing.

“I have schizophrenia.”

I’m on a Zoom call with my entire office. Literally every single employee, fellow, and intern. We even delayed the start time by ten minutes because a couple colleagues were stuck on a call so that I could make the announcement to all my coworkers at once. The pressure is on.

I made the decision to come out at work fairly spontaneously. I had emailed a friend to ask if he would do a presentation on psychotic illness at my job with me if I hypothetically decided to come out. When he emailed me back a very enthusiastic “yes,” I checked my work calendar and realized the head of the nonprofit organization I worked for was going out on leave in two days through the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Month in May. That gave me exactly one day to tell her I had schizoaffective disorder, which is a combination of schizophrenia and a mood disorder, and ask her if I could do a presentation on it at my workplace.

When she agreed to let me do the presentation – and responded to my coming out to her in pretty much the best way imaginable – it was game-changing. I hung out with some friends a couple days later, and they said I seemed more like my old self than I had at any point since the onset of my disorder. When I told one of my colleagues at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, San Francisco, where I volunteer, she burst into tears. None of us – myself included – ever thought I’d be able to be out about having such a serious mental illness in the workplace. But I was going to take the chance anyway.

Sadly, a series of awkward coming outs had taught me that a presentation would probably be necessary if I came out in my workplace. I’d gone through a phase earlier on in my recovery where I subconsciously believed that if I acted like I was perfectly okay with my diagnosis, perhaps I could will myself into being okay with it. I therefore told anyone who would listen that I had schizoaffective disorder, and I didn’t always get reactions that left me feeling great. People were at best confused, as nobody outside of the mental health advocacy sphere and the medical field really knows what schizoaffective disorder is. At worst, they were judgmental, projecting the worst stereotypes associated with schizophrenia and severe mental illness onto me. These experiences taught me that if I wanted to come out at work, I would need to explain my disorder and how I wanted to be treated in light of it.

So my co-presenter and I got right to work building a presentation from the ground up to destigmatize “psychotic” illness – or illness involving psychosis – in the workplace. We’d both done tons of mental health stigma reduction presentations before, but none quite like this. The workplace presentations I’d given in the past aimed to encourage audience members to start conversations and seek support for their own mental health, and they largely focused on depression and anxiety. I always felt a bit out of place sharing my story with schizoaffective disorder in those contexts, since as far as I know no audience member for any of those presentations could ever relate to my experience with a disorder that only affects less than one percent of the population.

But this presentation would be different. This wasn’t about the audience members and their mental health – this was about me and my mental illness. This was about breaking stereotypes that people like me are dangerous, violent, unpredictable, and unreliable. This was about training my coworkers to be allies to people like me who have some of the most stigmatized mental health conditions.

After my proclamation in front of the entire office, my co-presenter and I shared our personal journeys with psychotic illness. “People like us are dehumanized in the media a lot,” I explained. “So we want to begin by humanizing ourselves.”

My co-presenter went first and did a fantastic job, as I knew he would. When it was my turn, I told my whole story exactly as it happened, without glossing over any of the “craziest” things I did or believed. I explained how I believed a team of psychologists was controlling all aspects of my life and experimenting on me against my will for ten months. I told stories of talking to myself on the street, breaking into houses and cars, shoplifting, getting tackled by police officers, and getting sedated by injection against my will on multiple occasions. And my coworkers listened empathetically. They laughed at my jokes and flashed expressions of genuine concern when I talked about the stigma and discrimination I faced.

We then transitioned into a discussion of how my colleagues could be allies to people like my co-presenter and I. “I wanted to go over how you can use the most empowering language possible to talk about people with psychiatric disabilities,” I told them, “and I’m excited. It just feels really great to demand respect when you’ve been marginalized, so thank you for letting me do that.”

After the presentation was over, my coworkers broke into applause. More than half of the people who attended the presentation emailed me to thank me for it. My favorite note said that that person had already started conversations about psychotic illness with those around him.

It’s always a high to tell your story – to not have to apologize for having a mental illness – but it’s multiplied manifold when you do it in your own workplace. For days, I watched the recording I’d made of the presentation over and over again, cheering myself on. I showed it to my mom, my grandparents, and my friends in the mental health advocacy space.

Coming out at work is one of my proudest accomplishments. It doesn’t matter that it’s not the kind of thing I can put on my resume. I was brave and stood up for what I believe in, and I refused to hide or apologize for who I am. I believe the day will come that those with psychotic illness are accepted and respected, and it’s actions like this that will get us there.

Sally Littlefield graduated with honors from UC Berkeley and began a career in the nonprofit sector before experiencing the onset of schizoaffective disorder. She has since returned to a full time position in a non-profit organization and uses her lived experience to educate, support, and advocate for others experiencing serious mental illness. To learn more about her, visit her LinkedIn profile or personal website .

We don’t have the words: On the inadequacy of our mother tongues to communicate about mental illness

Sat, 01 May 2021 16:00:39 GMT

“I sometimes wonder if I will ever be able to convey the seriousness and intensity of my anxiety to my family. Words like “pareshaani” or “ghabrahat” are used far too often in trivial contexts in our conversations for them to be useful in my context”, I am told. This grievance is voiced by a 26-year-old marketer from Delhi who is learning to live with her fairly recent diagnosis of Generalised Anxiety Disorder. English feels familiar to many of us; it was the medium of instruction in our educational institutions and by that logic, it became the language in which we learnt to express our emotions, bolstered our arguments and relayed our lives.

Even so, most of us communicate with our families in our mother tongues. My family, for instance, understands functional English, reads an English-language newspaper, but for us to have a dinner table conversation in English, the world would have to turn upside-down. So, what happens when a person tries to inform her family about a recent panic attack in a language that befits dinner table conversation? Words elude her. While “pareshaani” roughly translates to “problem” or “worry”, “ghabrahat” has more physical connotations. It mostly conveys the physical trepidation, the flutters, or the somersaults your stomach does. The other closest word we can think of is “chinta” which conveys the worries one might have at any given point in time.

This struggle resonates with my own.

In my family, we ask each other “kya pareshaani hai?” when it seems like someone is struggling with something. The question translates to “what worry’s bugging you?” and not “what worries have you incorporated in the fabric of each moment of your existence?” It’s a fine line.

Saying we are “pareshaan” is our best bet to convey how anxious we are to our Hindi-speaking families. But even the best of these phrases is imperfect: it fails to differentiate between the worries of the day-to-day challenges we face versus the debilitating pressure of an anxiety disorder that impairs our functioning. “Pareshaani” will probably elicit empathy but it’ll still be construed as something bugging us, like a deadline, not as what it is: the weight of the grief of all the alternative lives you’re not living because of the design of life, but which your overthinking tricks you into believing a personal failure.

Rajkanya Mahapatra, 26, based in Kolkata, tells me how her experience of sharing the details of her recent bout of depression with her mother went, “It was a tough conversation when I tried to explain to my mum what anxiety feels like and that I had been seeking therapy. When it came to the specifics, it was harder to explain why I couldn’t get myself to do simple things like feed myself.”

The right words often seem elusive, “I don’t have the vocabulary for those emotions or experience even in the most fluent Bangla,” Mahapatra adds.

“It’s like those German words that have no equivalent in any other language,” she chuckles and sighs in the same breath, reminding me of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows that I now recall using as a teen to make sense of the emotions I was feeling.

Why do we need the labels anyway?

“…You people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”

Neil Gaiman, Coraline

My family is in the dark about my mental health struggles, but the secrecy isn’t for the lack of any attempt at transparency. The one time I came close to telling them about why I sought therapy as a grad student, I couldn’t go beyond, “it was difficult to manage everything.” Scores of triggers for social anxiety, missing one social event after another, barely mustering enough will to cook, being swept up in debilitating loneliness, and all I could come up with was “it was difficult to manage everything.”

On reflection, I am compelled to wonder what cause & effect are at play here: is it because we don’t have the vocabulary for them that we haven’t openly discussed emotions as a culture, or is it because we never gave emotions their due that we have been left to pick the pieces left behind by stigma, ignorance, discrimination and oppression against anyone perceived not “normal.”

Mental health — and the struggles — are often complicated beasts. Because we talk so little about mental health in common parlance, the complexity of mental health struggles is even harder to convey. How do you explain your passive suicidal ideation to a mother who is already breaking apart at the seams under prolonged financial duress. How do you know she isn’t ideating herself? How do you say you no longer feel excited at the prospect of existing and convey that life seems very hard, not that you are specifically interested in ceasing to exist?

Then, the real language of mental health isn’t a glossary of medicalised terms, but rather the words that can help us articulate our struggles. There’s a huge debate here about whether or not diagnostic labels help, but — at the risk of severe oversimplification — I’ll chalk it up to personal preference. Many people like having a name to the beast, others find labels reductive.

The bottomline is that we are not having the right communication about mental health with people around us. What is stymying this communication? The limits of our languages may have something to do with it.

It may also have something to do with the fact that “mental health” sounds very novel to my parents. I am not alone in this, either. Richa, 33, chips in, “Anytime I so much as begin a conversation about mental health or illness, it ends in me busting all the myths that my family believes in.”

Mental health awareness campaigns often focus on busting stigma by “talking about it”, or “sparking a conversation”. How will we make it a dinner table conversation topic, if it cannot be expressed in the language of the dinner table conversation?

Kritika Narula

Twitter

We need to talk about self-harm

jaclyn@generationmentalhealth.org (Jaclyn Schess) — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 14:42:00 GMT

TW: Discussions of self-harm and suicide

Note: Jackee writes this in her personal capacity as a person with lived experience, noting her own reflections on the way we talk about self-harm. This is therefore a piece that has more applicability to the US, where she lives, but others may find that it is relevant to their context as well.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health has been a hot topic.

Much of this discussion, though, has focused on universal experiences. Stress, loneliness, grief and their contribution to depression and anxiety. Many people can identify with these feelings: it is easy to understand depression as prolonged and unexplained sadness, anxiety as that gripping feeling of worry… even if these are blunt simplifications of these diagnoses.

The discussion of depression and anxiety in the context of COVID-19 makes me think about the fact that what we are seeing in media and public conversation, and what destigmatization of mental health tends to look like, focuses on exactly that: what everyone can understand.

Yet how do we explain experiences that less easily connect to the “average” person’s daily experience?

In particular, it reminds me how far we have to come in our conversation about self-harm. We must reckon with the fact that self-harm, both non-suicidal and suicidal, are legitimate responses to distress and do not make a person incapable of making decisions for themselves, or need to be saved.

Self-harm is, to me, one of the darkest and most stigmatized parts of mental illness in that I have found myself most worried of judgment and ridicule if I share this experience. I have lived with depression and anxiety since I was a child, was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and have generally been very open about my mental health experience with friends and family. But I have told very few people about my self-harm until now.

I want to be clear. For many people, like me, self-harm is not suicidal (what psychiatrists would call non-suicidal self harm). This has never been about wanting to die, but about making a painful life more bearable.

For me, self-harm is about release of pain. My first thought of self-harm came in relation to my chronic physical pain, as I visualized opening up my hip joints to release the brutal tension and throbbing I was feeling in that part of my body. In high school, during a severe bout of depression, I found myself so obsessed with my own self-loathing that the only way I could imagine releasing it was through cutting. Now my mechanisms are deliberately depriving myself of sleep and eating foods that I’m allergic to (I have Celiac).

Self harm was the aspect of my experience that I was and am most worried about receiving judgment for. What’s become clear is that for those who self harm, we have more to worry about than negative judgment.

When I was in college I was dealing with a particularly rough few weeks. My roommate had bought a knife to cut a cake we had bought for a friend’s birthday, and I had noticed it was in a drawer in our room. This had triggered my thoughts of self-harm, and on my way home to our dorm one day, I told my suitemate that I was worried about myself and asked if she would remove the knife before I came back.

Different than talking about anxiety and depression, to which I had always received generally open responses, this exploded. Our Freshman Counsellor and Dean got involved. I had to have a facilitated discussion with my suitemates. This experience made clear to me that while depression and anxiety are things that American teens are generally exposed to, they have not been taught how to think about non-suicidal self-harm and crisis response. The hardest part for me was that while this was in fact me taking care of myself, it turned into a situation where everyone around me thought I was instead an imminent threat to my own life. Inaccurate perceptions and counterproductive responses like these create and maintain an environment in which we often must keep our experiences to ourselves and cannot reach out for help.

This has severe consequences, and it doesn’t just come from our peers. In many cases people with mental illness are told to reach out when we need help, but the responses we get or what we come to know of the systems we will interact with tell us we are better keeping this to ourselves. This has been coined as the Carceral Helping Cycle, where it is difficult to reach out, the care that is received often is involuntary which further isolates us and continues this cycle.

Systems in the US are built on the idea that those who are a “danger to themselves or others” can’t determine their own treatment. This deters those who are self harming or suicidal from seeking out care for fear of losing our autonomy.

In the university context, this trend has been seen in the use of involuntary withdrawal. Many universities have come under scrutiny for subjecting students with mental illness to involuntary withdrawal, with discrimination claims at the center of legal cases [i] .

While I was in college, the mistreatment of students with mental illness, and their “being kicked off campus” was a prominent issue and impacted the student body’s ability to trust the university mental health system. During my first semester, I heard about a piece in our school newspaper titled “We just can’t have you here” in which a student described being forced to withdraw after self-harming and then seeking care [ii] .

After this experience, struggling deeply with depression, I went into a tailspin. It seemed clear from this student’s account and the conversation on campus that our administrators were more concerned with protecting themselves from liability than engaging in thoughtful care for students. They also seemed to interpret all self-harm as imminent suicidal intent and were uninterested in whether a student’s mental health would be better off on campus or at home. In this moment I resolved to never go to a university affiliated health center or hospital if I needed help, and put the number of a community hospital in my phone, convinced that this would protect me from the administrative nightmare other students had experienced.

Luckily, I never had to use this number. My mental health improved throughout college, but I continued to see how the administration’s failures impacted the student body. Friends told me that they were afraid to go to the counselling center as they didn’t want the university to know anything about their mental health struggles. More and more students talked about people they knew who were “forced off campus”. And this all came to a head when the university paper published a suicide note of a student who discussed her fear of taking time off from the university as she might not be allowed back.

While many universities have made incremental changes to their policies, it is clear that we have to think harder about how we engage with people who self-harm, and in particular we must appreciate the importance of autonomy and personal decision-making when it comes to mental health care.

Universities are not the only setting in which those who are deemed a harm to themselves or others are at risk of having their autonomy stripped away. A range of standards using the “harm to self or others” determination are used to permit involuntary treatment of individuals with mental illness throughout the country. Like the university context, in which rules appear more focused on protecting the university than the student, I am convinced that these standards are not in fact in the best interest of those with mental illness.

I have been acutely aware of this in my own treatment. A few years ago, I was getting ready to leave for a research placement in Australia, and experiencing some suicidal ideation, as I had in the past and continue to have sometimes. I was honest about this with my psychiatrist at the time, who interpreted me to be in an acute self harm situation. I did my best to explain to him that I was not in fact self harming and had no suicidal intent. Still, he insisted that he would not let me leave the country if I did not add additional medications to my treatment. As I protested this, he said in a half joking tone, “at least I’m not talking about locking you up.”

In reality I know that I am privileged to have never experienced forced treatment, commitment or incarceration. I know that the courts could listen to a psychiatrist over a person with mental illness any day of the week, even if there are limits on the courts’ ability to mandate involuntary treatment. But this meant I stopped being honest with my providers and it took years to find providers I could trust enough to start opening up to these parts of myself again.

We have gotten to a point where lots of people can empathize with the experiences of depression and anxiety. But we need to talk more openly about what self-harm looks like and why people engage in it. To me, this means reckoning with those dark parts of humanity even if they scare us. When we start to recognize that self harming is in fact a legitimate expression of distress, and can present with or without mental illness, we can recognize a way forward that focuses on addressing the larger societal problems that underpin most suffering, which have become even more acute during the pandemic. To address self harm we must move past our siloed understanding of mental health and instead think about how we can create a world that we all want to live in; a world where less distress means we have less need to engage in self harm in the first place.

[i] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/10/08/stanford-changes-leave-policies-mental-illness

[ii] https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/01/24/we-just-cant-have-you-here/

If you need support, we've compiled a list of resources here .

What Being Part of a Global Mental Health Conference Really Means

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 21:20:59 GMT

Oftentimes, we are greeted with the same advice over and over. Be sure to take care of yourself. Be sure to be happy. Be sure to make your own choices. But, what does this actually mean? This is a question that I found myself pondering amidst the start of what would soon be a pandemic that forever changed our lives. I thought I knew what they meant when they repeated these sentences back to me. Be successful. Care about yourself. Right? Or so I thought.

I never would have imagined that I would be sitting here, looking out my college bedroom window wondering what had happened to the life that I once knew. Nine months later, I had added a whole network of passionate individuals to my circle. I had participated in planning a global mental health conference that brought in attendees from all over the world and I had spent what seemed like an eternity indoors, attending online classes, attempting to answer my original question “What do they really mean when they say this?”

The time that I spent working as the Director of Partnerships for the 2020 Generation Mental Health Conference was a life-changing experience that altered my view of the world like no other. Each week beginning in May, we would meet up to discuss the importance of mental health and plan our conference - which always seemed like some sort of a pipe dream to me. Would we really pull it off? Would people want to hear what we had to say? We would discuss our own struggles and mental health challenges as well as discuss what our ideal event may look like. We spent hours and hours on zoom calls with each other, trying our best to iron out every detail of our event. I felt like I knew my team members better than I knew some of my friends, although we hadn’t even officially met in person just yet. It meant the world to me to have people to debrief with during such a sensitive time in our lives- when it seemed like everyone in the world was battling some sort of a loss due to the ever-changing world we lived in. I had learned about some of my team member’s hardships, their daily routines, and even got to hear about some of their favorite recipes. I am certain that every one of my team members would agree that our meetings were a safe space to say what was on our minds or even spend time distracted from our own minds.

As time went on, our event began to piece together little by little. What we originally thought would be our ideal outcome had become reality. We brainstormed all of the important aspects of mental health including its intersection with identity and we decided that our event had to have every aspect that we felt was important as well as create a welcoming environment for any individual who may attend.

Being a part of this team really made me feel like what I was passionate about mattered to other people and made a difference in their lives. The network of people that I got to work with opened my mind to all of the aspects of mental health that others dealt with day in and day out. I met with people across the world and experienced their lives and communities all through my twelve-inch laptop screen within the four bright pink walls of my bedroom in southeastern Michigan. I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to meet and work with such inspiring people, all while learning more about mental health and being able to inspire others.

Being a student aspiring to one day attend medical school, this experience also influenced my views outside of our team. From my experiences working in a doctor’s office and at a hospital, I noticed that mental health is often pushed aside as physical health is prioritized. Something that I hope to change as a physician is this ignorance of mental health as a priority in healthcare, because I believe that you cannot attempt to work on physical health if you don’t work on mental health first. I really believe and hope that in future generations we can work to destigmatize mental health and make talking about mental health a more normal and comfortable conversation so that everyone has a safe space and people to go to when their mind is not healthy.

So today, if you ask me again, what it really means when you are told the words “Be sure to take care of yourself. Be sure to be happy. Be sure to make your own choices.” It has a whole new meaning. These phrases are no longer a mere string of words to me. They are the importance of love and acceptance. They are having other people to lean on when you need it most. They are being there for others when they need someone to talk to. We can no longer ignore the true meaning of these words. We must continue to yearn for more. More talk about mental health, more emphasis on taking care of yourself, and more support to best equip the future generations of mental health.

By Miranda Manzo

Experiencing Grief during COVID-19: A Perspective

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 12:01:20 GMT

“Change is the only constant in life” - Heraclitus

Although I wrote this post at the end of 2020, it took me some time to convince myself the value of my experience; and how my experience may relate to those who may have lost a loved one and is experiencing grief as our battle with the pandemic continues. If in any way, my experience and lessons learned connect and are of value to at least one person, I think my objective is reached.

Even without considering the emergence of COVID-19 and the fear it brought, I will always remember 2020 as the year that changed my life. I was at a high in my life in 2019, driven to experience the most I could in this world, part of which a stepping-stone was embarking on an international experience that I dreamed of. I was pursuing a post-graduate program in Public Health, one which aligned with the difference I wanted to make in this world.

This decision of mine to move across the pond, while although difficult because I was leaving behind my loving family and friends for about a year, was something I knew I had to do. It was the journey I had to take in order to fulfil my life’s purpose. Furthermore, it was the perfect opportunity to show everyone, what a strong, independent and fearless individual I was.

I knew that this decision made my dad proud; it gave him the happiness that his child was able to follow her dreams. It was because of all the sacrifices and hardships that he went through, that I was able to live such a liberating life. My father was younger than me, when he left our native country in Sri Lanka, fleeing the civil war, he built himself, and worked tirelessly through so many hardships (a fate that many refugees and asylum seekers still face), in the hopes that he would secure a better future for himself and his family.

2020 was my year to make him proud. I took my international opportunity very seriously, ensuring that I could make the most out of my time spent overseas. I made sure that I had stories which I could tell my dad, because I felt those were significant moments that would make him proud and make him see how much I valued his guidance and his faith in me and my dream.

B ut just like that, on February 7th, 2020, 10 days before my 26th birthday, my father, my mentor and my biggest supporter, the person that I was working so hard to make proud, passed away. Just like that I felt my world come crashing down. I spent 5 hours flying back home, unable to wrap my head around everything. Beating over the fact, how did I let this happen? How was I so selfish?

I have been told that after the loss of a loved one, the time spent coming to terms with the change can be extremely difficult. Normally, we get support from our loved ones, and those that were near to the one we lost. While that was true in my case, it was not to the extent or caliber that it would have been had we not all be in a global pandemic. There is comfort in face-to-face human interaction or human touch; yet because of social distancing and lockdown measures that were enforced, the warmth and comfort one would find in hugs and acts of compassion from friends and extended family became a foreign concept.

The lockdown measures at the beginning of the year were very hard to cope with. Rather than carrying on with each person’s busy schedule, this time was an opportunity for families to spend quality time with one another. However, for me it was in dealing with the negative emotions of realizing that my family was not complete, nor would ever be from this point on. These feelings were so unfamiliar, and so conflicting. What is worse, is that any time I had negative feelings or negative thoughts running through my head, it was my dad who immediately noticed the change that seemed to be plastered on my face, it was only recognizable to him. He helped me get through all the hardships I faced thus far in life; but now that he was not there, it was something that made me feel even more conflicted and lost.

I’m sure that we can agree that we do not know what tomorrow will bring. But during a global pandemic, the uncertainty in what tomorrow will bring is extremely anxiety provoking. Think of what this thought would be when you are already going through uncertain times-hard to wrap your head around isn’t it?

The stress of losing a loved one is without a doubt extremely difficult and having to deal with the uncertainty and stress of COVID-19 is something that is even more stressful. At first, I would do everything I could to avoid coming to terms with all the life changing events that have happened this year.

I pushed myself into work, studying and pretending like I was okay on the outside. I put up a front, showing to others that I truly was strong, saying things like I’m okay, when I was just numbing the pain of losing the most important person in my life. I never thought to ask anyone for help or would always respond as if everything was fine; I just assumed they wouldn’t understand what I was going through. I never asked my mom or brother because I didn’t want to put them through the pain that I was feeling. I would suppress the tears anytime I felt down. I thought that if I started crying, I wouldn’t be able to control the ache in my heart and wouldn’t know how to stop crying.

It’s nearing a year since I lost my dad, and the pain is still very new. Emotions overcome me in waves. And when I’m down, it is difficult to do anything else. There are moments, when I feel like I can get work done and “enjoy” my day, and then there will be moments where I cannot move, get out of bed, converse with anyone, and will just sit silently not realizing how much time is passing by.

I decided that I was finally ready to write this blog. Experiencing grief without a doubt is one of the most difficult experiences to go through in life; and to do so during exceptionally uncertain times, such as the global pandemic we are experiencing is even more difficult. But what I wanted to emphasize and really advocate for, is despite all the craziness in this world or in your life right now, try not to hide your emotions.

There is nothing inferior about coming to terms with your emotions and addressing those vulnerabilities. I remember trying to suppress feelings when I was low, by pushing myself to work harder; but throughout these 9 months, those bottled-up emotions burst 2 or sometimes 3-fold higher. Reach out to your loved ones, you don’t have to go through this alone. Even though situations have changed in which you should follow pandemic protocol; the support you can get can still be obtained. (For those of you who may know someone who is going through a tough time, reach out to them to show your support). Most importantly, be nice to yourself, and accept that you cannot control everything. It's important to come to terms with that, and realize that with time, things will sort themselves out.

By Lahmea Navaratnerajah

SPEAK MIND LOVE FOUNDATION: from lived experience to advocacy

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 20:05:06 GMT

Speak Mind Love Foundation is a youth led mental health organization based in Kenya, that focuses on awareness raising, advocacy, resilient building and mentorship. It was established in December 2018 by Maureen Gikonyo and Immaculate Karanja who both share lived experiences in depression and anxiety. This came about after the realization that mental health was a taboo topic due to lack of awareness in the country. In addition, accessibility of mental health was also proving to be futile, especially for the youth coming from humble backgrounds who are even more vulnerable. In 2017, Kenya was ranked 6th in Africa, among the countries with the highest rate of depression. Majority of this population, are young people. This came about due to various social and economic challenges such as: abuse. gender based violence, unemployment, societal pressure, early teenage pregnancies, illiteracy among other factors.

According to WHO, 10-20% of children & adolescents, have a mental health challenge. Half of this cases begin by age 14 years. Unfortunately, due to poor surveillance systems, most of this case goes undetected/untreated. Suicide, on the other hand, is the second leading cause of death among young people of between ages 14-29 years. It is for this reason, that our target audience is the youth. We highly believe that this age group is the most productive age and is effective, when it comes to problem solving especially in mental health preventative measures.

Since 2018, we have been able to have various achievements in awareness raising, advocacy, resilient building & mentorship. We have practiced mental health awareness at the grassroot level, in churches, schools and in various communities in our country. In addition, our team has taken part in various discussions on mental health, both internationally & locally, as panelists, on various platforms including national television. In 2019, during the World MH Day, our organization was successful in coming up and hosting the first ever mental health walk in the country that attracted approximately, 2000 participants. This was in collaboration with the Nairobi County Government of Kenya, different youth led organizations, international organizations, youth leaders and advocates. Through the walk, we were able to create massive awareness through various approaches such as art. We were also able to advocate for mental health in our country and bring to the realization that there is a menace in our country that needed attention. In addition, we were also successful in reaching out to various communities with MH materials through the community leaders. In 2020, due to the COVID 19 restrictions, Speak Mind Love Foundation, in collaboration with The Ministry of Health and other youth led organizations, was able to carry out a virtual campaign for two months dubbed Walk A Mind. The campaign attracted approximately 4000 internet users with the #WalkAMind trending at number 5 in Kenya on the World Mental Health Day. The campaign was able to achieve massive awareness raising, establishment of various innovative aspects in mental health field during & post COVID 19 through a multi-dimensional approach, advocacy through the establishment of a communique among other various achievements.

Working in the mental health field, has been both amazing & a learning process. We have learnt to listen to understand rather than to respond. Secondly, we have also had the privilege to witness the potential of young people with lived experiences. When it comes to problem solving especially in mental health, young people are the most innovative hence it is imperative for countries to begin to involve persons with lived experiences in policy formulations and implementation. There is great potential in the community when it comes to mental wellness. For this reason, empowerment should be made a core value. This way, it will also give persons with lived experience a platform for their voices to be heard and for the community to take action on the menace by embracing awareness raising, community mental health programs & research. There is a dire need to normalize community dialogues and conversations on mental health. The most important lesson we have learnt, is that everybody has a role to play when it comes to mental health. This includes: individual, community, national and international level.

Challenges ar e inevitable in every journey, that therefore does not exempt our organization. Our major challenge has been stigma in the society. For the longest time, mental health had not been recognized in our society. It has been a taboo topic being linked to witchcraft in some communities. This therefore prevented most people from opening up and seeking help. It has taken much effort to sensitize the community on mental health and we couldn’t be happier to witness the changes that are happening. We are on a great journey to ensure that mental health, is a priority for every person.

To any young person out there who wants to improve mental health in their community, we hope you know that you are capable. If you have a dream, start working on it. There will never be a perfect timing. Start walking. The society needs you and is looking up to you to be the voice. In Mahatma Gandhi’s words, “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” Be the change you would want to see. Begin.

For more information:

Email: info@speakmindlove.org

Phone Number : +254713659188/ +254713314225

www.speakmindlove.org

Instagram: @speak_mind_love_foundation

Facebook: Speak Mind Love Foundation

Twitter: SML_Kenya

The Changing Tides of Friendship

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 16:01:46 GMT

You sat there without a voice, and my heart broke for you...

The sun beamed on us as we blasted music and shared a laugh in the car. You in the driver’s seat, steering us towards an afternoon of adventure. It was just like always, like what had been before was on pause several acts ago in the movie.

It all changed that winter. A shift that I’d known was coming, but that I didn’t want to believe. I worried that if I truly acknowledged the obvious, that it would will it true, even though it was already happening. You’d always been my rock, my mentor. But It was time to shift into a different role.

That’s the thing about friendship. It takes on many forms, and evolves to fit many circumstances.

There were the times where it was difficult, where I didn’t know where things sat. Where I felt like my primary role was carer, as opposed to friend. It was a hard road to navigate, but through road blocks and rocky terrain we got there.

You sat there without a voice, and my heart broke for you. I would show up for you, the same way you’d shown up for me.

It felt like a whirlpool, like a ping pong ball being hit in every direction as I tried to stay balanced. I mourned for the past, but came to accept the present. Piece by piece we built it together.

Through waves of emotional distress, hardship, surprises, admission and heartbreak, I watched you rise, each time more resilient than the last. And I watched you flourish and utilise these experiences, using your diversity to make a mark, and a big one at that.

I’ve seen you with such vacancy behind your eyes that it felt like you were living in a whole different world, lost and confused. I’ve also seen you thriving and lighting up the world with your smile and bright aura. Smiles and laughter in your wake, an incomparable warmth in your smile. We’ve seen each other through the highs, the plateaus, and whatever else lies in between.

Just because there are new layers, doesn’t mean a new you. I’m no longer afraid to seek advice, to add to your plate, or your burdens. We are equals, each with our own unique challenges and hardships that we can help each other through.

Finding the balance in our friendship wasn’t a straight road, but a windy one less travelled. But we got there. Change can be displacing, but in this case it proved to be enhancing. Here we are now, stronger than ever and seldom a worry not shared. It really feels like we’ve been through it all.

I guess that’s just us.

Suicide Prevention Week - An Interview with a Member of a Suicide Hotline Team

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 14:16:03 GMT

In recognition and respect for Suicide Prevention Week, we spoke to a member of a Suicide Hotline team, who shared her perspective and experience.

If you're ok sharing - what made you join a suicide prevention hotline?

When I was in middle school, there was a group of girls on my bus that would always get off the bus to go work at the hotline. They were some of the nicest and smartest girls I knew and they talked so highly of the hotline that I always knew that one day I wanted to be involved. I ended up getting involved with the teen suicide prevention hotline when I was around 14 years old and worked there consistently until I left for college and still do some work with them to this day. I think when I first started working there I was too young to understand the scope and power of the hotline but I’ve always had a desire to help others so it was something I was excited to be doing.

Can anybody join a suicide prevention hotline? And is there a training that guides you through this job?

The process tends to be a little complicated. First you need to apply in order to be involved and there is a multi-step application process. Once you are accepted, there are several stages of training that you have to go through before you are able to start answering the phones. The initial training is around three months and involves learning about all the different topics that you need to know about. The final step before you can start answering the phones is a series of tests surrounding the information you learned in the previous training.

Can you tell us about the biggest challenge you faced working for a suicide prevention hotline?

In my opinion, the biggest challenge was always knowing that there are going to be some situations where you try your best to help as much as you can but sometimes your best doesn’t feel sufficient enough. At the end of the day, your phone call is only one phone call. The person on the other end of the phone needs to take the steps to help themselves because you’re not going to be able to be there to help them at all times.

Any advice for those who are trying helping loved ones through a depressive episode?

My advice would be to show your unconditional love and support because in the end that is going to be the most important thing that you can do for someone. And of course if you feel like the situation is out of your control it is always important to reach out to a professional.

Could you tell us some common techniques used on such hotlines?

The most common techniques that we practiced were breathing techniques, empathetic listening, identifying coping skills, identifying support systems and giving out national and community resources.

Any major lessons or takeaways you'd like to share with us?

The biggest takeaway that I would share is that sometimes just being there for someone, even just being there to listen to them or talk to them can be incredibly helpful. No matter how small that may seem, sometimes that is all that someone needs to feel seen or understood by someone else and that can mean more to someone than anything else.

From Lived Experience to Lived Experience Leadership - A personal story of hope and resilience

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 11:18:10 GMT

As part of our Lived Experience Blog, Jenny shares her inspiring story of transforming her personal struggles into lived experience leadership.

I have faced a lot of challenges & adversities over the years. Dad and my sister were both extremely unwell with mental illness (schizophrenia, anxiety & depression) their behaviours were very unstable at times, family instability lead to parents separation for 3 months, I also went through my own experience of mental illness (anxiety & depression) I have faced a lot of stigma & discrimination over the years.

Mum almost lost her life through a medical error which resulted in a longer stay in hospital, Dad passed away from cancer on my birthday in 2005, he spent the last few months in a nursing home, when first diagnosed he was in hospital for 18 weeks due to medical errors and complications – his cancer battle lasted just over 18 months. I spent a lot of time at home to help care for him while Mum worked full time I was also fulfilling Government job seeker requirements like Work for the Dole and other activities during this period. A few years after I was a carer for my sister while Mum was away for 8 weeks in New Zealand when my grandmother became very unwell, My sister become mentally unwell again during this time. I didn`t know how to help her and we weren`t getting much support from anyone.

I endured long periods of unemployment but completed courses, participated in volunteer work & casual work to improve my chances however even though I was constantly looking for work, the rejection letters kept coming, no one would give me a chance. I went to university for a year I started a teaching degree but that dream was crushed, I personally struggled with my studies to the point I only passed 3 out of 5 subjects in semester 1 and only 1 subject in semester 2. I failed my teaching placement even though I tried really hard, then regrettably made the difficult decision to leave at the end of the year. School was also a very challenging time I was bullied from when I started all the way through to Year 12 both physically & verbally, I struggled with schoolwork, and ultimately failed my HSC.

My life has improved incredibly over the last few years, 2020 is my 3rd year as a Raise Mentor, In my first year I worked with a challenging student she had a lot going on in her life and slowly as the weeks progressed she opened up to me even more, I found out she was suicidal, I immediately informed my supervisor and we were able to build up a support network around the young person, her confidence grew throughout the program, she was putting her hand up in class more, at graduation she walked up to collect her certificate something I wasn’t expecting her to do, she showed so much courage and willingly accepted our help, my fellow mentors/supervisor noticed a really big change-the welfare teacher thanked me for getting my mentee to open up. In 2020 my current supervisor nominated me for Westfield Local Hero Awards.

Last year I played a major part in the Central Eastern Sydney Primary Health Network Regional Plan. My lived experience story I wrote was published within the plan, part of it was used in a media release and I was asked to speak at the official launch in which about 60 people were in attendance even though I was really anxious I did it, the feedback from everyone was positive and it built up my confidence, The plan has been developed to improve mental health services & programs in the region. I have been a member of their Mental Health Advisory Committee since 2017 and I was appointed to their Community Council in 2019.

I have written stories about my experience with mental illness & recovery available on Roses in the Ocean & Women with Disabilities Australia websites, my own story was promoted on their social media pages on International Womens Day. In conjunction with Inside Out Associates I was part of a book project called Our Own Words 50 people with lived experience including myself authored the book and after a successful crowdfunding campaign it was published. My Lived Experience Story appears on other websites including WayAhead and the NSW Mental Health Commission.

I`m a current member of the Board of Directors for One Door Mental Health, I have been a member of the Consumer Consultative Committee since 2016, in 2020 I joined their Evaluation Reference Group and Quality Care Committee. I`m also a mental health peer educator for One Door Mental Health in this role I share my story of lived experience with other people, I have spoken to university students, medical professionals, state govt employees and one door staff & volunteers my main objective is to educate the public and reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Based on what I have achieved, I was chosen as a case study/success story for the Annual Report and newsletter that was published in 2016, I was given the opportunity to speak at the One Door launches for Chatswood and Parramatta by the regional manager in 2017.

I worked as a volunteer on the telephone mental health support & information service at One Door for over 2 years, working one shift every week where I made outreach calls to people who have limited social contact and are isolated because of mental health issues and needed extra support. In 2017 I was a volunteer in the Compeer program run by St Vincent de Paul they matched me up with a person who has become socially isolated due to mental illness. I spent 4 hours a month catching up with the same person over a 12 month period.

I have been involved with projects/consultations with a number of organisations including Being, Western Sydney Recovery College, St John Of God Hospital, NSW Mental Health Commission, Mental Health Coordinating Council, Mental Illness Fellowship of Australia and National Mental Health Commission. I sit on other committees including Sydney Local Health District Lived Experience Advisory Panel, Suicide Prevention Australia Lived Experience Panel and the Recovery & Wellbeing College Student Voice. I am a consumer facilitator for a mental health awareness course in South East Sydney LHD.

Everyone in the wider community benefits from my work in the sector, but the young people I mentor within Raise Foundation programs benefit the most from my knowledge & life experience. I do what I do because I love it, it gives me a sense of purpose and brings me so much satisfaction especially seeing young people flourish. My story is proof you can recover from mental illness and lead a fulfilling life.

Overcoming Colourism in the South Asian Community

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 16:37:21 GMT

Why this is an essential step in being an Ally to the Black Community.

The Black Lives Matter movement has been present for 7 years, yet some would say that it was after the horrifying killing of yet another member of the Black community this year that the world saw the injustices against the black community. The horrifying killing of George Floyd was a wakeup call to many on police brutality. However, it also drew attention to the macro problems that have existed and permitted for systemic racism to prevail for so many years. Groups of people around the world, have joined in protest, holding hands to confront police brutality, white supremacy and systemic racism. I’ve been one of those people who took a stand, however, I don’t think that is enough. I think in order to show allyship to the black community, we must address the systemic issues that are embedded within our own communities, such as Colourism within the South Asian community- something that I am ashamed of saying has molded the South Asian psyche for many years. If you are someone that supports colourism, then how can you be an ally to the black community?

What is Colourism?

Colourism is the idea that those who have darker complexions are less beautiful, less deserving or less successful than those of fairer skin. This is an ideal that is very much prevalent in the South Asian community.

Growing up, I’ve had my share of experiences with colorism; to the point where in my naïve pre-teen years, I felt uncomfortable by my melanin rich skin. Listening to their criticism of my skin colour, I felt the need to hide myself indoors during sunny summer days, avoiding the beach at all costs, and even wondering if I should invest in some Fairness creams. Yup, you heard me right, a 10-11-year-old feeling so ashamed of their skin color, that I would consider bleaching my skin to feel more beautiful or at the very least, get out of hearing criticism. The worst part of all of this, is that skin lightening products are a multi-billion-dollar cosmetic industry in India, that distributes worldwide. Unilever produces fairness creams called Fair and Lovely, marketed towards women; and Fair and Handsome marketed towards men; and provide a “solution” to getting lighter skin and aiming for “what’s more beautiful”. --And that is the way these products are marketed, with huge populations of people seeking them.

Q: So where does this obsession for light skin come from?

A: The legacy of colonialism still exists today. Racial hierarchies were established in colonized India based on skin tone; where preferences were given to those who were closer to the colonizers. The unfortunate truth is that these beliefs are embedded in a lot of cultural norms, where white supremacy is the rule.

Hypocrisy within South Asian context

Krishna is a very popular deity, celebrated throughout India and many parts of the world. According to Hindu and Sanskrit texts, Krishna was known for his dark complexion; however, most of his representation in mainstream media is always as a fair skinned male. A similar occurrence goes for Draupadi- a essential character in the Hindu epic Mahabharata; and praised for her beautiful melanin rich skin in Hindu scriptures is always depicted as a fair skinned woman.

This picture is a prime example how colorism translates into action.

A couple of months back, I came across this picture on social media, It was a bride who was getting her wedding makeup done. I remember and still am completely outraged by this picture, and still recount some of the comments praising the work done by the makeup artist. I couldn’t understand how this was something to applaud. This bride had taken on a new identity, and that was being celebrated? Internalizing the structural implementation, colourism can have detrimental effects on one’s wellbeing, and overall, negatively impacting one’s sense of self-confidence, self-esteem and self-worth. In many times, one might find the only way to be accepted is to subjugate oneself to the pressures of colourism, as seen by the picture above.

What I wanted to address and be firm on is my response to colourism in the South Asian community. Marching in protests is not enough! In order to be the best ally to our black brothers and sisters, we need to analyze the embedded systemic racism, ( that may be as apparent as Fair and Lovely commercials or perhaps, not so obvious such as unconsciously having a bias towards shopping only at non-black owned stores). We need to address and educate those in our community why colourism is a significant problem.

Mental health is an imperative, irrespective of your degree

Sat, 18 Jul 2020 20:14:00 GMT

Jahin Tanvir shares with us how exploring his extra-curricular interest in mental health has propelled him from a range of ambassador and volunteer roles, to his current position as a Government Advisor for youth health and wellbeing!

Jahin's story reminds us that anyone, irrespective of their educational background, can create a career in the diverse and multidisciplinary field global mental health.

When I was going through my schooling, there was the common saying that was a staple in every conversation about careers. “You will be happy when you do what you are passionate about.” That inevitably led to the perception that we should choose a degree or career pathway and invest ourselves wholly into that field. After all, you do your best when you put all your focus into one area of life, right?

It took me until I reached first-year of university did I realise the feeble nature of that outlook. As human beings, we have multiple hobbies and interests that fulfill us Some we pursue on a daily and others we do not for countless reasons, predominantly that of a lack of time. As we prioritise ourselves, we often forget that there is a world outside of us where issues are growing, with or without our input. One of them is the monumental rise in mental illnesses. Research states that more than one in ten people globally suffer from mental illness and that number continues to grow every day.

I was first involved in the volunteering space straight after I graduated from high school. I moved interstate for university in Australia and I quickly realised that after work and university, my days were spent with me constantly yearning to be a part of something bigger. Unlike school where someone else holds you accountable with opportunities, university life opened a space where you alone had to go out and seek out your interests. I wanted to invest my time into projects that impacted causes I cared about. To reaffirm my life motto that ‘actions speak louder than words’.

That led me to first apply for the role of Youth Ambassador for Headspace, an Australian not-for-profit organisation for youth mental health established by the Australian Government. I have not really been a person inflicted with major mental health issues but my peer circle composed of individuals who had cases of anxiety and depression – the worst aspect of that was that barely any of them sought out help or accessed services that would assist in them managing their mental health. Coming from a subcontinental background, an unfortunate reality is that speaking out about one’s mental and emotional wellbeing is still regarded as a social taboo. This concept has transcended generations to be a strong part in the social fabric of many nations. This hinders individuals, especially young people, from going out and reaching for support when they need it. Often, we see people leave their recoverable worries to the idea of “it is what it is” and “no one will understand”, prolonging time to only exacerbate their issues. As an aspiring healthcare professional by trade, my passion has always been around a person’s overall wellbeing. Mental health is an integral component of a person’s mood and fulfillment in their day to day life and seeing people not take action to improve led me on my journey to become an advocate for young people and mental health. My aim has always been to stop those suffering in silence and shine light for them to take the necessary steps and strategies required for them to reach a sense of satisfaction. For them to blossom in activities that they hold dearly. That was my intention and what I plan to dedicate my work to.

As someone whose sense of excitement is birthed from being multifaceted in nature, that one initiative of volunteering as part of the Youth Ambassador program for Headspace then opened a world of opportunities and gratifying experiences that have completely transformed who I am and the way I perceive the world. After a few months and a bit more researching, I discovered a whole array of opportunities for young people to create a difference in the community in positions that allowed that from the ground up.

Over the past two years, I have had the privilege of holding youth leadership roles for various humanitarian and youth centred organisations such as the Red Cross, United Nations, World Vision etc. From there on, I was able to build networks and translate the experience in the youth leadership field towards attaining a government job where I pertain to an advisory role for health and wellbeing for young Australians. I strive to play a role in formulating young people’s needs in health research and public reports with mental health being at the forefront of discussions pertaining to young people’s needs.

All these ventures only happened when an impressionable 18-year-old decided to take a leap of faith and to act on intentions. It does not matter what degree or direction you have chosen for yourself formally, maintaining a good mental space is a universal component that seeps into all aspects of life. How you perform in interviews, your relationship with your family and friends, your emotional intelligence with your partner - it is essential that we hold each other accountability for how we aid others who need it more than ever.

You do not even have to be a direct mental health researcher or practitioner; your voice alone is still enough to get involved and create change in the field. Advocate and ensure suffering voices are heard and addressed.

By Jahin Tanvir

Beginning to understand racism in the field of mental health as a white person

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 08:20:00 GMT

The headlines were once again talking about racism - yet another valuable life, that of a man named George Floyd, had been cut short at the hands of others. And something snapped amongst the populations of countries across the globe. No he wasn’t the first victim of police brutality, no he wasn’t the first person of colour to be wrongly accused of a crime - but he has since become a pivotal point in history. And the reaction of the world was intense.

Over the years, I have read countless newspaper articles about Stephen Lawrence, the Charleston 9, Breonna Taylor, India Kager, Darrius Stewart…...the list goes on. I read about the claims of institutional racism amongst the London Police force, the Minneapolis Police force and all other justice systems involved with the deaths of Black men and women. Each time I felt we were taking several steps back as a society, how and why were we letting such crimes go unpunished? Treating victims as nothing more than newspaper fillers?

I decided to educate myself further on the matter, and found the institutional racism is not simply confined to that of the Criminal Justice System.

Royal College of Psychiatrists (2018) stated that individuals from Black, Asian and Minority ethnic backgrounds are “more likely to experience poverty, to have poorer educational outcomes, to be unemployed, and to come in contact with the criminal justice system. These, in turn, are risk factors for developing a mental illness. These individuals are also less likely to receive the care and support when they need it.” So then, does the base of racism set up these individuals to forever be a target for poor education, living standards and access to help? Are they predisposed to have less support from their fellow man, simply because centuries of racism has been ingrained into our founding values and laws?

“Racism is pervasive and can manifest in several often-overlapping forms (including personal, cultural, structural and institutional racism). Like other types of discrimination, it can lead to a profound feeling of pain, harm and humiliation among members of the target group, often leading to despair and exclusion. “ Is it any wonder, when we isolate individuals and communities?

Research into depression and its link with racism have further supported the claims of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Black people have an increased risk of depression, anxiety, PTSD and Panic attacks. They can be perceived to be constantly living in survival mode, questioning everyone and everything they come in to contact with.

As part of the human race, I feel it is time that we start, once and for all, to break down these structured divides we have created for ourselves. In all my travels I liked to think of myself as educated, and I didn't honestly believe that I was racist. However, it wasn't until the Black Lives Matter movement really came into focus these past weeks that I realised I am still flawed in my views. Yes I had studied history, I always pride myself on being open-minded and viewing all sides of the story. But in my school education, and now my personal education as an adult, there is much I still have to learn. Nobody is perfect, and whilst I never claimed to be perfect, I shocked myself at just how little I really knew and understood about the Black Lives Matter movement. As a white individual I felt it wasn't enough to simply be "not racist" I had to ensure that I was educated enough to be able to help end this racism on a bigger scale, not just on a personal one. I found the ,, Anti-Racism resources for White People document extremely useful as a starting point - as admittedly to begin with the countless petitions, newspaper articles, books and social media posts were a little daunting. From there I have progressed onto other resources, finding my own way through, and learning in my own time.

We have spent too long judging each other based on the colour of our skin, our race, our countries or religions. It's a long road ahead, and the journey wont be smooth, but it's long overdue for us to be the kind, accepting individuals we already claim to be.

To Live is to Lose, and to Lose is to Live - A poem by Matthew Jackman

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 08:47:00 GMT

Sharing our lived (or living) experience stories has no standard template. Sometimes, in an effort to express ourselves, we are encouraged to explore other creative mediums, such as art, music and poetry. Sharing your story isn't just about getting it out there for others, it is about processing your emotions and experiences for yourself as well. I hope this poem, written for my Mother, inspires you, and encourages you to share your story.

Dear Samantha,

To live is to lose,

And to lose is to live,

For you I miss, I hurt, I love,

I grieve,

For you I dare to breath,

I grieve and yearn, I mourn, I bereave

So complicated, I begin to seethe,

For you once more I dare to breath,

For breathing is to live, and to live is to lose,

Once more I breath, I live for you.

In loving memory, honour and dedication of nee’ Samantha Maree O’Connell

Born 7/4/1971, Death 7/9/1999.

There is immense power in sharing your story with others. However you feel comfortable sharing your experiences, Generation Mental Health wants to support you to do so. If you are interested in sharing on the GenMH Blog, please message me at: matthewrjackman@outlook.com .

Fighting for myself - Surviving an Eating Disorder & Chronic Suicidality

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 13:26:00 GMT

Holding on to Healing and Self-Compassion during Times of Extreme Stress

Content warning: Eating Disorders, Hospitalisation, Suicide

Lived Experience Lecturer and mental health researcher Rosiel Elwyn bravely shares an insight into her experience of living with an eating disorder. Courageously truthful, Rosiel is an inspiration for anyone who is struggling in their own fight for themselves.

Before you begin this article, I would like to add a content warning: this piece will discuss eating disorders (without numbers), with some mention of hospitalisation, and suicide (without specifics). It is important to note that all forms of eating disorders are serious, distressing conditions. I consider every eating disorder to be an emotional and medical emergency for every person with one, for the crisis they cause in the emotional wellbeing of an individual, and the stress on the body. Whether or not the person has ever had treatment for their eating disorder or has been diagnosed. The majority of people with eating disorders are not at a low body weight, which may lead to additional stressors and risks, and problems accessing help. The most common eating disorder is also Binge-Eating Disorder, however the most studied and discussed eating disorder is Anorexia Nervosa. Although eating disorders are a debilitating condition, some people with eating disorders have some privilege of increased visibility which means we are more likely to receive help. I am white, have anorexia nervosa, and am at a low weight, which means I was more likely to be identified as needing help. Unfortunately, the treatment I received was often harmful and traumatic, as were the inpatient and outpatient treatments I received for other mental health issues, in addition to facing stigma in treatment for being an LGBTQ+ person. However, many people with eating disorders are invalidated, or are denied access to treatment due to arbitrary and dangerous weight or other medical thresholds, putting lives at risk. There are also intersectional oppressive factors that limit treatment accessibility, such as those involving race and culture, disability, neurodivergence, genders and sexualities, weight, age, pregnancy, menopause, and health conditions (e.g. diabetes). If you are living with, surviving, and on the pathway to healing an eating disorder, please know that every experience of disordered eating is serious. Your safety matters, and you deserve care. Don’t give up.

It’s 3 a.m. I’m awake, as always. I sleep for two hours at a time, then wake, clockwork. It’s a painful reality of the damage done to my body after over two decades of anorexia nervosa. My body is in metabolic hibernation. It wakes me up before my heart beat gets too slow in sleep. The chronic insomnia comes with a state of intense anxiety and restlessness, another indicator of damage; Starvation Syndrome. My body wants me to search for safety and nutrition, because it is telling me I am in danger, and I am. I used to be a lucid dreamer, and I miss it. Now it’s so rare for me to sleep deep enough to dream, it upsets me to think about.

(**It’s important to note that Starvation Syndrome and Metabolic Hibernation can occur at any weight, shape, and size. It is not to do with being at a low body weight, but to do with not having had the nutritional needs met for your body over time. If you are a person with an eating disorder who is at a higher weight, you can be suffering from Starvation Syndrome and can be in Metabolic Hibernation. Symptoms of Metabolic Hibernation, for example, are poor circulation, cold intolerance, lanugo, heart issues, insomnia, anxiety and hypervigilance, and many, many more. While I am attempting to heal my relationship with food and damage to my body and metabolism over the years, I also needs to restore weight, and have made some progress. Cycles of weight suppression and restoring weight can be important for anyone with an eating disorder, irrespective of their weight, shape or size, in order to help heal stress to the body. Unfortunately people with eating disorders at higher body weights are rarely given information about the need to restore their weight after weight suppression and weight cycling in order to heal Metabolic Hibernation and Starvation Syndrome – and are given harmful messages about that reinforce their eating-disorder cognitions).

I have a degree in psychology, I’ve worked as a peer support worker for ten years, I’m a Lived Experience lecturer, and now a mental health researcher. I’ve heard so many talks and read countless research articles about eating disorder recovery, and met many recovered people. But there’s still an overwhelming sense of how? for me, at the sheer enormity of it. It’s hard for me to imagine a life that I’ve never truly touched or embodied. How do you re-wire your brain when you have been like this for most of your life? Since the age of 8, I have had anorexia nervosa. I recently turned 29. I don’t know what life is like outside of this prison anymore. I don’t know what it feels like to feel a solid, centred connection to myself, to others, to the world. I don’t know how to feels to feel physically well and strong. But I want to, and I’m getting closer than I ever have to realising what that means.

The best tools I have in the war against my mind, my biology, and the numerous life events and social determinant factors that shaped my eating disorder are my personal strengths. I have an unusual capacity for powerful mental imagery, which is both a terrible curse for intrusive imagery and traumatic memories, and an incredible strength for transforming harmful images. I have creativity, and humour as weapons, and I use them as much as I can. Above all, I am persistent, and it has kept me alive through incredible odds. I am a fighter and a survivor, and I am using these strengths to continue healing from a destructive, harrowing, alienating illness that robs me of the life I want , and of being the person I know I am. I feel like a shadow of myself, and the grief is immense. There is so much grief for everything I have lost.

It’s 3 a.m. and I know it’s the easiest time for me to eat. It’s a hard-won discovery. If I eat now, it gets easier to eat again throughout the day. Eating at 3 a.m. has become a ‘rule’, where removing the indecision of eating now removes the subsequent indecision of eating later. The choices get easier once the first one is made. I know I have to eat, and I have to get through the misplaced sense of threat that accompanies eating. My heart is unstable, and my muscles and bones are still fighting for nutrition. I have to re-train my mind and body to trust that eating is safe, that I am safe, that everything will be okay, and that food will be regular and predictable again. At its most basic level, I am teaching my primal instincts my world is not as hostile as it has been in the past, to change my predictions, and transform my habits and behaviour.

Food is medicine, and food is life. The messages in my mind that suggest that food is anything else are internalised violence. These scripts, these voices, these narratives are alien intruders. They are not my own, and I am learning to reject them and identify where they come from. I am learning to see them for what they are, and survive them the same way I survived harmful events. I am learning to use my own internal voice of rebellion and self-advocacy. These voices (the eating disorder voice) come from other people that I do not agree with, people who have harmed me. People whose ideals and actions I can recognise, if enacted to anyone else, I would reject with every element of my being, and do everything in my power to fight; so I must fight these ideals internalised in myself. These voices come from people who thought I was worthless, people who thought I was less than human. I am learning I do not have to agree, or re-enact their violence onto myself. These voices are echoes of harm I have survived. They come from violence, abuse, and neglect. From harmful hospital experiences. They come from the prejudice and stigma of being physically and emotionally bullied - bullying for being a person with scars, for being LGBTQ+, for being hospitalised in mental health wards. When these voices are loud, every act of taking care of myself, of showing myself gentleness and kindness, of feeding myself, drinking water, giving myself rest, of speaking to myself with compassion- is a radical act against them. After two decades of suffering, I am starting to reclaim my life.

3 a.m. is a magic hour. It’s an hour I declare war. This year marks the first time I’ve been able to drink a nutritional supplement drink when not forced to in a hospital ward. Now, I drink it to nourish my heart, nourish my gut, and nourish my brain. Sometimes it still takes some arguing with those destructive voices. Sometimes there is still cognitive dissonance and resistance, like thick walls of glass and paralysis. “You don’t deserve life, you don’t deserve breath, it would be wasted on you…” but it’s quicker and easier to silence them now. I’m using my own voice and sense of rebellion. I give a mental “F*** you” to those who have been violent to me. I tell them to watch me drink this medicine, and then watch me eat, and possibly enjoy it (!!). They’ve tried and their ghosts are still trying to kill me, but here I am: I’m alive. My internalised hatred has led to me to trying to kill me too, and I never thought I’d get to where I am today. To this point of emotional healing, to this level of comfort with myself and who I am. To this level of curiosity and excitement for the future. I have a long way to go, but I’m come further than I thought possible, and further than any doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, or nurse had predicted. I have hope, and I believe in myself.

This year has been another rocky one. I started out being discharged from hospital after a collapse at work, where I nearly died. I left that job for the sake of my mental and physical health after being bullied by a co-worker for months, with senior staff failing to meaningfully intervene. At the time I was hospitalised, I was also completing my Master of Professional Psychology degree, and ended up writing the last of my reports and essay from the ward, while on 24/7 nurse supervision, bedrest and nasogastric tube refeeding, which added to the nightmare and stress of the experience. I was afraid that I would fail right at the end of my degree; a degree already littered with hospitalisations and deferrals from my anorexia and other mental health issues. It would mean a severe loss out of many losses my eating disorder has caused. I managed to submit my final assignments despite the situation, and passed. The hospitalisation was particularly traumatic. It took four months for me to be able to process what happened, and to write a complaint about my experiences, to try and prevent the same treatment happening to anyone else. The re-traumatisation of the events before and during the hospitalisation led to intense suicidality and despair. I increased my therapy sessions from every two weeks to every week, at times with more frequent contact with my psychologist until I was safer. After the fallout of the hospitalisation, the COVID-19 pandemic began to unfold. My graduation was cancelled, and physical distancing was enforced.

As a person with compromised immunity from my years of disordered eating, I faced some vulnerability. My bones are also fragile, and my muscles are weak: I have to be careful about the amount of physical activity I do. I cannot drive, and rely on public transport to go to the shops and get food, and am in a low-income demographic. But public transport was now not an option. I now faced more severe food insecurity, which increased my risk for further deterioration of my medical stability and my eating disorder. What if things got even worse?

I was struggling to obtain food as often as I needed it, and had to walk to the shops and back. I started getting dizzy again, fainting, and getting breathless. All a repeat of the times where I was in terrifying spiral. Using electrolyte tablets, nutritional supplement drinks, and vitamins saved me in the pandemic. I was able to restore some of my strength, while I continued trying to focus on tackling eating foods I hadn’t eaten in years (‘reclaiming foods’), and working on my self-compassion. I had confronting reminders of how much I have to do to reclaim my physical, such as stumbling and breaking toes, or sitting up and passing out, or getting breathless from bending down because my heart is weak. It was upsetting to think of the problems I have to heal, but comforting to know that it can be done. I’ve met others who have fully recovered in similar circumstances, or from other debilitating eating disorders, including those who have recovered from having had multiple eating disorder experiences (known as ‘diagnostic crossover’, or from a trans-diagnostic approach: a wide spectrum of eating disorder behaviours). Then there are reminders of how much I want to reclaim my emotional health, such as becoming aware of the internal critical voice tormenting me for hours over perceived failure. Or denying myself engagement in listening to music, creating art or writing poetry, having social interaction, warm and comfort, or other pleasurable and lovely experiences because consciously or subconsciously, I felt I didn’t deserve it. Becoming aware of these elements of my eating disorder, however, increase my motivation for healing and recovery. I’ve come far, and I want to go further.

My eating disorder was never about food, weight, shape, or size. It was about self-destruction. About worthlessness. About self-hatred, about feeling unsafe and trying to recreate safety and a sense of control and agency. It was about isolation and retreating into the self. Now, I’m fighting for a way out. This hasn’t been easy in the COVID-19 pandemic, but I’m doing better than I would have predicted, even reflecting on a few years ago, when I was in the darkest realms of anorexia, psychosis, depression, and suicide.

In situations where I feel more extreme distress and a sense of entrapment or loss of control, for me, this can rapidly translate to escalating suicidal ideation, fantasy, urges, planning, and self-harm and suicidal behaviour or attempts. Because of this, it’s critical for me to remind myself what is happening in my mind when this is occurring, in order to save my life. The sense of threat leads to a desperation for escape, agency, and freedom. This is also related to trauma, including iatrogenic trauma from harmful hospitalisations such as being put in isolation and forcibly physically, mechanically, chemically, and psychologically restrained. It is critical for me to tell myself that while I do not feel safe , I can regain my sense of safety and that while it was not okay, I have survived traumatic experiences before, and regained my safety and freedom. That my mind is anticipating that the current threat I am experiencing will escalate to the worst experiences I have faced, and that the danger will not end. Then out of terror, I am finding relief and freedom in the concept of nothingness or oblivion through death, where nothing can hurt me. In this state, I must reassure myself that I can help myself to become safe, communicate my needs to others, and restore my sense of safety.

Amidst the COVID-19, I’ve managed to uphold my sense of agency by choosing not to focus on the future too much, and choosing to concentrate on one bite, one meal, at a time. Choosing to contribute to community and social justice efforts for the oppression and unrest in the world, such as donating to Black Lives Matter and Aboriginal Lives Matter in the United States and America, and justice efforts for refugees and people seeking asylum in Australia. Including attending a Black Lives Matter and Aboriginal Lives Matter demonstration that maintained physical distancing. After this rally, I was in bed for days from the exertion, so it was another lesson in being careful and realistic to prioritise my stamina and safety as well as prioritising my values and emotional wellbeing.

I’ve learned that it’s very important for me to spend less time on social media right now, especially when some people are engaging with harmful messages about increasing fitness or focusing on weight loss during the COVID-19. It should be cause for absolute sadness and alarm that during a global pandemic, weight stigma and weight-based prejudice is so powerful, it’s become such a focus and a source for more harm for so many people, when life, and survival, is what matters. One body size is not more valuable than another – it’s layered systems of oppression that try to convince us otherwise.

Seeing others normalise messages of weight loss being positive and a focus, and increasing fitness being a goal is life-threatening for me. My body is already extremely fragile, and a few years ago I was addicted to exercise to the point where I was hospitalised with the beginnings of organ failure. There was an element of obsessive-compulsiveness in it for me, and escapism. I wanted to block out the world, and escape from myself through exercise, as well as harming myself with pain and exhaustion. In order to keep myself safe from my exercise addiction, two years ago I had to enforce a “rule” that I would not allow myself to engage in any real physical activity other than walking, as my heart and bones are still too weak, and until I am more medically well, I am at risk of death. Again, my exercise problems had nothing to do with weight, shape, or size.

However, during COVID-19, seeing other people normalise these messages does make it harder for me to continue to challenge my anorexia. There’s a sense of “I mustn’t really have a problem… everyone must have exaggerated”. After seeing a few posts from people, I suddenly started to exercise “just a bit”. I started fainting and having severe tachycardia and breathlessness, with the same kind of physical deterioration I’d had before previous hospitalisations. Luckily, I stopped, and spend days on complete bedrest and increased my nutritional supplement drinks. Messages about the ‘ideal body’ and need to ‘earn’ food, or moralised food (good vs bad) harm all of us. I’m learning to disengage from these messages and recognise how they affect me: they strengthen my sense of worthlessness, and that I am undeserving of life. I would get a sense that “well if that person thinks they have to punish themselves with exercise or shouldn’t eat ___, I’m a vile human being, so what do I have to do?” Now I recognise where these thoughts come from, and how to challenge them: with self-compassion, self-acceptance, patience, and rebellion.

I’ve learned to be kinder to myself – to challenge self-criticism about how ‘productive’ I’ve been. That if I have days where all I can do is lie down, listen to podcasts, watch Netflix or youtube, that it’s what I physically and emotionally need. That if I write poetry, that’s just as much of an achievement, especially emotionally, as if I spend the day doing work on a mental health research paper. I’ve learned that one of the best things I can do for myself is make the day’s goal to make the short walk to the lakes at the end of the block to watch the black swans and ducks, look and the trees and birds, and just take time to be connected to nature. It’s important for me to talk to my twin sister every day – it always has been – but during the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been more open and honest with her about difficulties I’ve had with my eating disorder, body dysmorphia, anxiety, and suicidality, and she’s been an amazing support. She, thankfully, doesn’t experience these issues, and can support me with reassurance and reality-checking, as well as reminding me how far I’ve come compared to even a year ago, let alone five or ten. In the midst of COVID-19, I’m fighting for a future, for one that is socially just, fighting for life, fighting for my mental and physical health, and fighting for myself.

By Rosiel Elwyn

The re-traumatization by doctors that adhere to rape culture

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 09:03:00 GMT

Content warning: this blog post includes topics of sexual assault, rape, and gender-based violence. Please see our crisis page if you are in need of country-specific support.

Previously published in Women's Media Centre, GenMH Peer Advisory Board Member, Esmeralda Altmeyer, bravely shares her own immensely traumatic experience with the hope to draw attention to the issues of rape culture, and the important role of medical professionals in destigmatisation and victim support.

When I was in Spain for my gap year after high school, I was raped. I trusted my perpetrator, and had thought about hooking up with him before. But when I changed my mind he got angry and violent.

The next morning, I was devastated. I felt immense pain in my lower body and shook uncontrollably everywhere. While I didn’t (and still don’t) recall the act itself, I remembered everything else that happened before and after and knew something was wrong. I spent the next four days crying in my room. I was tremendously afraid to leave the house, both because I was afraid to see him again, and because I felt like marks of shame were visible all over me.

At first, I tried to brush off the effects of the rape on my physical and mental health. When I returned home to Germany, I even thought about getting in touch with the rape response center in my hometown, but could never pick up the phone. I felt something all too common among rape victims: that my identity and my worth were irreplaceably lost. The only thing that remained within me was the trauma and the desperate need to hide what had happened, to never tell anyone. But after two months of living with constant, intrusive thoughts, of not eating or leaving my house, I came to the realization that this was not something that would solve itself over time.

Reaching out for help was the hardest thing I’ve done in my life. My best friend, the only person I had told, made the call that saved me. Rape response centers are widespread in Germany; many cities and towns have a local one. They are mainly funded through the government and offer anonymous, free counselling and other forms of support. I was lucky enough to receive amazing help from a social worker who had extensive experience and knew exactly where to start to put me back together.

That same social worker also recommended that I consult a doctor to be put on antidepressants, but when I consulted my general doctor, she was outraged to learn about my response to my rape. While she gave me the prescription, she only did so after continuously repeating that she doesn’t understand why women (like me) don’t report our rapes and how we can’t expect anything to change if we don’t stand up for ourselves — putting the responsibility for what happened to me into my hands.

This was just the start to many discouraging experiences with medical professionals that would follow. Just two months after I met my social worker, I had to move to a new city to start university, and found myself in search for help again. My experience at the rape response center in my new town was a nightmare. I already felt uncomfortable with and nervous about sharing my experience with a stranger, and within the first ten minutes of meeting my new social worker, my fears were confirmed: She asked me to describe the details of the act of rape itself. This information is not only completely unnecessary for a social worker to know right off the bat, but was also extremely triggering for me to share. It had taken me months to even say the word “rape” out loud, and now she wanted to hear every detail?

As if this wasn’t enough, the social worker then told me that we should start working on what she called my “weak character.” My rapist had easily recognized this flaw, she said, and that had made me his target and gotten me into this situation in the first place. In addition, she advised me to beware men in general, especially at night. Placing the blame for my rape on me and then telling me to be cautious of strangers when my trust in the world was deeply shattered and I was already anxious around men in public was the opposite of what I needed to hear to be able to live a normal life again. Needless to say, I never returned to that rape response center.

I continued to try to find new, effective counselors, but doing so was a difficult journey. One female therapist, for example, told me that my thoughts and feelings were not valid after I told her I was afraid of wearing a bikini to swimming pools because the thought of men seeing my exposed body made me feel vulnerable. But after searching and searching, I finally found a good counselor who picked up where the other had left off, and started rebuilding my strength.

I am very grateful that I did ultimately find two wonderful and skilled women who helped me overcome my trauma and the PTSD that followed, but I am deeply concerned about the experiences I had to go through in between. Rape response centers usually don't offer long-term treatment, and in Germany, like in many other countries, therapists beyond these centers are in high demand. When you reduce your search to female therapists who specialize in trauma, it’s easy to find yourself calling up every therapist in town and still not being able to receive an appointment within the next three months. Even after you get an appointment, there is no guarantee that it will actually help you — and, in fact, it could push you even further into a state of destructive self-hate. I had to pick myself up countless times after failed therapy sessions when the result should have been the opposite. That reaching out for professional help could make my pain worse was the last thing I had expected. Unfortunately it is an all too common issue.

Rape is a global epidemic, as are the myths about rape that perpetuate the stigma that surrounds survivors. Rape myths, such as the idea that rape has to be physically violent or can only be committed by strangers in dark alleyways, are deeply interwoven into cultures all over the world and effectively prevent the dismantling of the rape culture that enables rape to keep happening. These myths take a lot of time and effort to unlearn.

Unfortunately, like the rest of us, medical and mental health professionals grow up in rape cultures. Even though their jobs require them to accommodate and ease the suffering of everyone in need, including rape victims, they’re not always equipped to do so. In Germany (as well as in many other Western countries) it is estimated that around 25 percent of women will experience rape or sexual violence in their lifetime, and yet medical training does not currently devote adequate resources and education to the very people expected to respond to these millions of women.

The results of this gap in training and needed response are clear and very worrying. As Courtney Ahrens, psychology professor and researcher at California State University, found in her study “Being Silenced: The Impact of Negative Social Reactions on the Disclosure of Rape,” rape victims frequently report receiving negative or unhelpful reactions from medical professionals. Furthermore, when rape survivors encounter victim-blaming behaviors or attitudes, they experience a “secondary victimization,” or what some call a “second assault” or a “second rape.” Speaking out about the assault may therefore subject survivors to further trauma at the hands of the very people they turn to for help, and they end up feeling even more silenced than they did before.

Victims should not have to regret reaching out for help. Each time that I found the courage to try a new therapist, and each time doing so was another discouraging experience, it took me months to build up the strength to try again. It was exhausting.

It has taken me the past three years to recover from the trauma of rape and its aftermath as much as I have, and I am still not fully recovered yet. Living with PTSD after rape is the most intense suffering I have experienced. It’s devastating to think that so many women have to go through that suffering alone, for so many years. The medical field needs to realize that it is alienating and in many cases actively re-harming one of the suffering groups that needs its help the most. Psychology and medical students and social workers need to learn how to accommodate people that have been through the trauma of rape or they will continue to not only be unable to help but also worsen the experiences of one out of every eight people.

By Esmeralda Altmeyer

Riding the Pandemic waves of Bipolar

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 06:31:00 GMT

Another day passes, alone in isolation, sitting present and still with complex emotions and moods at times beyond my internal control. I wake up struggling to move, suffocated by my brain riddled with anxiety, depression, hypomanic exhaustion and disempowerment from my family and mental health systems.

I know I am unwell, but this time I can feel the anxiety and depression creep in. Emotional in bed, I pull myself into the shower and dress to impress hoping this will lift my mood ever so slightly. I think about all I have lost during the pandemic - my father, friends, a job, someone I fell in love with. The building wave hits me so hard I collapse to my bedroom floor awashed with tears. I grieve, and relive past traumas in a state of despair. I need out, but I want to live.

The pandemic induced a depressive episode brought on by anxiety and emotional responses to grief and trauma. The slow withdrawal from society enabled the perfect storm, waves so high I could barely surf. The biggest wave came crashing down when I admit to myself it’s time to engage medication once more – a strategy I am often resistant to as a last resort. I attend the doctors office teary eyed, soft, gentle, and without energy much like my mother two decades earlier. “You will be glad to know I am ready to take medication again” I said with a smirk to the Physician. Much to the doctors surprise, she trials a medication that absorbs in my mouth given the historical trauma of swallowing after previous attempts to take my life.

The unfortunate reality kicks in, and again another wave, bigger than the biggest. Scarier than my worst fear. This time the medication impacts my concentration, thoughts, motivation and worst of all sleep . The medication impacts my job, as I accidently take an antidepressant sedative after lunch for a few days – wondering why I fall asleep mid afternoon. I read up on this medicine and realise it’s dosage is for night use.

The damage is done, as I miss emails from my manager, who calls me in for a work review. Before having the opportunity to explain my mental health and the circumstances she calls in Human Resources through the recruitment agency. I thought the ever engrossing waves of the pandemic had broken me, consumed me and swallowed me to the bottom of the ocean. I thought I could no longer suffer the isolation, despair and harrowing pain of grieving the loss of my father and lover, but I reclaim my sense of self and take small steps to building my confidence, my mood and most importantly challenging my thoughts and behaviours spiralling me towards hospital on this cold winters day.

Once showered, I shop for food and surround myself with other people, I try to smile ensuring I connect whilst entrenched in the Bladerunner soundtrack of my noise cancelling headphones – so eloquently moved by symphony I begin to dually smile and cry. I buy a new office chair, as I know part of my recovery is writing, exercising what strength and mastery I have left I begin to write – and so here we are.

I am an overcomer, and will fight until the final round. In many ways its all we can do. Fight to survive what has collectively impacted our health and wellbeing in many fruitful and adverse ways.

I plan for the future – in the hope of keeping me going in the now. For hope and connection are the source of our survival and recovery. I rebuild my life once more, awashed with the COVID19 pandemic consequences.

I surfed to shore once more .

3 Ways To Better Maintain Your Peace Over Panic During Periods of Disruption

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 08:24:00 GMT

Mallory Rothstein, Founder and Chief Learner of Learn What Matters shares with us some practical tips to help us maintain 'peace over panic' during these challenging times. To learn more about Mallory, check out her Facebook Live Q+A with GenMH Founder Jackee Schess!

Throughout your life, whether you’re 5 or 85 years old, you’ll experience some sort of disruption. Whether it’s as small as your sibling abruptly changing the channel on the TV you’re watching or as large as experiencing an unexpected car accident, disruption is part of everyone’s life, even for CEO’s, celebrities, and world leaders! No one is exempt and disruption is a constant that is not going anywhere soon.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen the fear and panic that disruption can often have on both a societal level and on an individual level. Many people have recently found themselves struggling to figure out how to maintain peace over panic during this unprecedented time. Myself included.

Just when I was supposed to be submitting this blog post to Jackee from Generation Mental Health, I got a text from my sister that said, “I have shocking news…” She then shared that a close family friend of ours died by suicide. Everything in my world suddenly got disrupted. I was less than 10 minutes away from an important business call. This blog post was overdue. I had tons of virtual speaking engagements planned for the next few days ahead.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t panic at first. I postponed almost everything my schedule had planned for the following 48 hours after receiving that text. To be clear, the goal is never to be perfect but rather to become more self-aware and lessen your duration of panic each time so peace can be felt sooner.

It can be difficult at times to maintain your peace over panic during unexpected disruptions but my goal is to make it easier by sharing 3 ways that can help you progress in your journey.

Here are the 3 Ways To Better Maintain Your Peace Over Panic During Periods of Disruption:

Focus on what you can control.

There is a lot in life we cannot control, including disruption. But there is still a ton that we do have control over. The first is what you consume. Think about what foods, music, social media, and news you’re choosing to consume. The second is what you create. Think about what inner thoughts, creative projects, and environments you’re choosing to create. The third is who you call. Think about who you choose to call or surround yourself with when disruption happens. It’s critical that what we consume, what we create, and who we call bring us more peace and happiness into our lives than increasing panic. Ever find yourself upset then playing sad music all day or calling up that one friend who always has something negative to say? No more of that. Focus on consuming, creating, and calling the people, places, and things that bring greater peace over panic into your life.

Identify your triggers and create a trigger plan.

Identifying what triggers you is important. Take out a journal or wherever you virtually log notes. Next, make a list of people, places, and things that trigger you in a negative way. For some people it might be hearing their ex’s name and for others it can be having a health scare. There is no limit on the amount of triggers you should write down. Include them all. This creates greater self-awareness for the following step which is to write down all the things that bring you your greatest joy. Maybe that’s exercising or playing with your pet.

Developing a trigger plan is about having a list of people, places, and things that make us joy so when we experience a trigger or disruption, we can choose from our list something that can instantly lessen the feeling of panic. For example, when I got that text from my sister, I decided to cancel my work meetings then take a nap, run a bath, and dance around my apartment listening to my favorite music. These are some of the things that often relax me and did help lessen the heightened negative emotions I had been facing.

It’s all about finding what trigger plan will work best for you.

Prioritize play and fun.

When disruption happens, we often go into ‘serious mode’, increasing our feelings of fear and anxiety or intense problem-solving. Play and fun often fall off our radar when in reality they should both be at the top of our priority list. Going through disruption doesn’t mean you can’t still watch silly TikTok videos or play board games with your family or friends. Laughter and smiling can be medicine itself. During this pandemic, one of my aunts sent different family members puzzles which we all competed together to see who could complete the puzzle first. It was a great way to have all of us take our minds off the stress of the world and have fun as a family.

Make play and fun a priority in your life, especially during disruption.

I share these 3 tips to help you better maintain your peace over panic during moments of disruption. Over time, as you continue to apply these tips, there is a near guarantee that panic will lessen and peace will come sooner.

If you’re looking for more tips, please feel free reach out to me on any social media platform under @ilearnwithmal or Mallory Rothstein.

Domestic abuse under lockdown: the crisis we could have foreseen.

Wed, 27 May 2020 09:24:00 GMT

The UK saw it. There, written on the back of newscaster Victoria Derbyshire’s hand, was the number for the National Domestic Abuse hotline. Soon, everyone was talking about it, from the UK to the USA, everyone wanted to report on it. Celebrities and Governments alike filled their social media pages with the latest statistics, the best helplines and their predictions of how COVID-19 was going to affect the already worrying numbers of victims.

So just how will it affect people?

According to BBC News and the National Abuse Helpline, there was more than a 25% increase in calls for help in the first two weeks when the UK went into lockdown , with numbers set to rise throughout the duration of our quarantine. Victims have reported their abusive partners being “even more intolerable” now that they are confined and forced into what is an already tense and frustrating situation. Thankfully, the UK Government has offered an immediate £2 million campaign to help support this increase in cases due to the COVID-19 lockdown of the country.

But the UK is not alone in this. Worldwide there have been reports of more violence, more serious abuse cases and an increase of those at risk . Spain has seen an 18% increase in calls for aid, and France has seen a massive 30% increase. It has become so prominent a problem, one that the UN has suggested that all governments take urgent action to combat the expected domestic violence increase . Experts are worried however, that governments worldwide have not acted fast enough, and that there will undoubtedly be a spike in “intimate terrorism” cases across the globe. This is a sad result of, once again, governments not learning from those countries who are a few months ahead of Europe in this disaster. For example, both China and Italy, two countries that were struck early, had severe numbers of domestic abuse claims. As a result, America has declared that people suffering abuse may “disregard” the lockdown orders if they do not feel safe at home. Whilst this is a gallant effort to stop the spike in cases that Europe seemed to fail at stopping, it does then beg the question of the safety of numbers of victims suddenly breaking quarantines. Unless they have extended family to stay with, where are these refugees going to be housed safely during this time of crisis?

Sadly this is not an eventuality that the world seemed equipped to deal with. There is hope in the number of domestic abuse helplines and charities cropping up, however the priority now lies with finding a safe, hygienic haven for these people in times of need - we need to make sure they aren't escaping one problem to jump straight into another.

If you are in distress and need support during this time, please check our crisis page which has a range of country-specific mental health resources.

Sobbing without support: a tale of pandemic ‘living experience’

Tue, 26 May 2020 09:03:00 GMT

Sharing an unfiltered introspection into my living experience, and revisiting my complex post-traumatic stress.

I lay in bed listening to classic music and playing Grand Theft Auto on the Xbox with fragile watery eyes drenched in the relational trauma of someone I dated, my family, my own Queer community and the mental health service system designed to support us here in Australia.

The wave of hopelessness, helplessness and anguish is compounded by the grief of concluding a relationship, whereby this person demanded there was no point in reconnecting or wishing me 'all the best'. After having fallen in love after five years of avoiding relationships – you can imagine my emotional response. A trigger to my diagnosis of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder characterised by emotional regulation issues relating close relationships.

I have been hurt by the people I love throughout my life, mostly family and the occasional partner. Whether abuse, neglect or complete abandonment I have learnt not to trust people as intimacy and closeness has been an unsafe space for me.

The Pandemic has escalated isolation through my natural support systems collapsing and a strained mental health service system . A system that is poorly equipped to deliver trauma informed assessment and intervention; leaving me repeating the same 13 traumatic stressors occurring this past month, triggering childhood issues of complex grief and trauma.

I seek support from family, but this presents its own complex feelings. A father driven by guilt and enabling me to become the caregiver of my younger siblings – I choose not to speak with him to make a point, having lost my main source of support due mixed feelings of love and hate.

I trusted someone I loved – and was once again neglected, treated like an object and thrown to the wolves of suicidal thoughts, intent and plans. This time I know I am unwell, and make the call to an online suicidal call back service over the weekend whilst uncontrollably sobbing under the pillow in my bed so that my housemate can’t hear. There’s a part of me that wants to take that same fate as my mother, but know I have my own destiny so I share my distress, feeling alleviated from the distraction of conversation and shared humanity through empathy and validation.

The pandemic has come at a time when my mental and emotional health is at its strongest, my resilience cultivated through many months of previous hospitalisation and rehabilitation. This means I feel again – associated with my emotions once again – I feel pain, anguish and sorrow. I feel anger, rage and revenge. I feel the impact its had on me through this slowing down of life.

The pandemic has brought the best and worst out in my emotional self, for that I have grown and found renewed hope. The road is long, and the healing is slow. But with my best friend, I share and cry and grieve and relive pain. Thank you my Angel, I would not be alive without your support throughout the pandemic. Your connection, validation, advocacy and support helps me to trust humanity once more. Thank you for your dose of hope.

If you are struggling through this difficult period, please check our crisis page , which includes a range of country-specific mental health resources.

2020 has brought a different meaning to the word normal.

Fri, 22 May 2020 09:14:00 GMT

It’s a tough time for all of us…but we can get through it as a collective.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that emerged in November 2019 has left the world facing a plethora of new experiences and new emotions. In fact, one could almost say COVID19 virus reformed the world in ways that were not expected- at least to this magnitude. When national governments around the world started issuing nation-wide lockdown procedures, closing down borders, schools, universities, preventing large school gatherings, and workplaces started implementing working from home procedures; 2020 has brought a different meaning to the word normal .

Life before the virus was moving at such a fast speed, the idea of staying at home for a bit may have brought some sort of relief. In fact, it could have been seen as a golden opportunity to take a pause from the stresses of our daily lives, perhaps even take some time to find our hidden interests and hobbies we had put on the back burner, since we were “too busy”. Although it was a good change initially, as quarantine measures extended, the question of when our lives would return to normal became a persistent thought . Personally, I longed to be able to take my car out to work, to interact with my friends and colleagues again, in person rather than virtually. I miss lining up outside the movie theatre amongst a crowd of other enthusiastic movie junkies on premiere day. I miss sipping on a cup of cold brew coffee inside my local coffee shop. I know I will miss patio season in Toronto this summer, and mostly, I miss having the option to travel the world. That was my “before virus normal.” Now, much like everyone else, I am enduring a different kind of normal; one which often leaves me feeling extremely low. Especially when realizing that all of the plans and opportunities that I had before the virus became a global pandemic, were postponed or non-existent.

I recently watched as groups of people protested against quarantine and lockdown measures on CBC news (a news channel in Canada). In that moment, the first thought that came to mind was how detrimental this was to our progress in flattening the curve. Yes, we are all panic stricken, many of us are missing out on how our lives were before the virus. However, by gathering in large groups and protesting against lockdown measures, we run the risk of harming those around us and unjustly those that are adhering to the national protocols.

During these testing times, it’s important to realize that yearning for our lives before the virus is not a crime. Yet, we should do our best to ensure that we do not let our emotions take over the essentiality to follow safe protocols. COVID-19 is a global problem, one which indeed tests us very much so, but this is also a problem that can be overcome, if we stand united as a collective against the virus.

By Lahmea Navaratnerajah, GenMH Peer Advisory Board Member

Are we heading towards a mental health pandemic?

Thu, 14 May 2020 07:55:00 GMT

In the United Kingdom, it has been reported that 4 out of 5 adults are worried about the effects that COVID-19 is having on their well-being, and nearly 50% of those are reporting high levels of anxiety along with it. So how might this global pandemic affect us all in the long term?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) published a document back in March 2020, specifically looking into different ways to support and care for yourself and others during this outbreak and looking into maintaining positive mental health beyond it. They look at the ways in which healthcare professionals might deal with their mental health differently to parents looking after their children, the elderly with cognitive decline in isolation and even managers in facilities looking after a team of staff. Each section looks at the different challenges each my group might face, the mental stressors they might have, and overall gives advise depending on circumstances. Whilst this seems an adaptable approach, it doesn't quite look into the real long term burden that this global pandemic might cause.

But then, the answer may be, as with most things related to our current situation, that there is no way of accurately predicting long term effects of the pandemic. So far, most of the updates, policies, reactions and advice surrounding COVID-19 have been extremely changeable, last minute and fairly weak. From Governments to Health services, nobody is willing to commit to one avenue of thought, one plan of action, due to how unpredictable the disease seems to be. In this way, it is completely understandable that we would have no sense of long-term effects as a result, because we cannot say how resilient one person might be to the next. Could their resilience depend on how their government dealt with the pandemic? Is their resilience a purely individual one?

World renowned psychiatrist Vikram Patel gave a Ted Talk back in 2012 about Mental Health on a Global scale. In it he stated that in Europe alone, over 50% of those with mental health issues did not receive the help and support they needed, whilst in Asian countries like India, that number was closer to 90%. A lot can happen in 8 years, however even recent numbers have shown that, whilst improvements are being made globally in mental health, it still isn't in a majorly significant way. At the time of his Ted Talk, Vikram quoted the WHO numbers for those living with some form of mental health issue at being 400-500 million people worldwide. Now that we are in the midst of a global pandemic its hard to imagine how much higher that number may be, and how much more strain has been put on those 400-500 million by their current situations. In 2012, if you added all the different mental health issues together - dementia through to autism through to depression - then it would add up to more than 15% of the global burden of disease (in this case accepting mental health problems as a health/disease related subject). So how much of the 50% of Europeans are now getting the help and support they need? Or has the number risen with all those being affected but not being able to reach out, get help or even get a diagnosis?

Research is being done continuously on what effects the current pandemic might be having. In Australia they are researching the effects on children and their development as a result of several months foregoing school and not having the usual routines or ability to interact with others due to lock down. Across the ocean in the United States they are looking into the mental health affects on different age groups, after having has reports that 18-44 year old's have borne the brunt of the negative mental health effects of the pandemic.

Overall, the burden of such a disease may not become apparent for some time to come. With different countries and cultures and families dealing with it in their own way, their own time, we cannot know for sure how we will surface from this unsettling and unpredictable disease. However, one positive to take away from this could be the openness and awareness about mental health issues. With mental health becoming an ever increasingly discussed topic, perhaps the stigma and discrimination might be something reduced throughout our time in lock down. Once we are able to resume our new normal (whatever that may be) people might find it easier to receive help should they need it, and might not feel the shame that so many have reported in the recent past about having a mental health problem.

The mental health and service user experience during COVID19: From personal to professional disaster

Tue, 12 May 2020 08:35:00 GMT

I write alongside my heater in the lounge room as the weather reaches 8 degrees centigrade on a dreary and rainy winter like day in Melbourne, Australia. Working from home has been a struggle, as I gather myself into some sort of routine by going for a walk, showering and setting up my laptop in an area well insulated in my flat. My housemates are either working night shift at the hospital attending to COVID19 demands or have gone home to their families in the country side due to quarantine restrictions. I have lost a sense of purpose during this time experiencing collective and global anxiety, given the world has lost its way forward as it responds to crisis without forethought about how the world will look when this global health crisis subsides.

Recently, I lost my sessional academic role teaching social work. This was due to student enrolments decreasing as a result of COVID19. Sadly, there no support from the federal government in job seeker payments, which is an injustice for 70% of the higher education workforce who are causal in Australia. However, I applied to access my superannuation early due to losing more than 20% of my income which was a federal government initiative. Our financial health has taken a battering during the collapse of materialism and a false economy founded on debt and Capitalist sentiment.

Fortunately, I continue to work as a mental health clinician in government department alongside veterans and their families who need support via tele-health. Sharing common and collective concerns over the phone with people has been an empathic unifier as people I partner alongside as a clinician self-manage expectations about timelines and ask you how you are going as a clinician? What a change.

However, working from home has been difficult, given I am battling with my own experiences of anxiety, mood fluctuations and thought disturbances with a diagnosis of Bipolar Affective Disorder as defined by Psychiatry. It can be difficult battling with others' inner demons when you are experiencing a similar phenomenon.

The mental health system and its broader intersections with health, education, employment, income security, housing and disability has not been able to cope with the demand and many of us accessing services have felt let down in not attending to our complex grief, loss and trauma. Alongside our formal support system, we have seen the collapse of our informal support system as there has been significant family and relationship conflict due to the physical distancing and quarantine sanctions resulting in a relationship breakdowns and discord. Now to deal with my grief without adequate supports.

The most devastating impact on my mental health has been witness to humanities greed and we have seen this in privileged individuals accessing essentials goods and services in supermarkets, those same individuals not complying to public health advice in physical distancing and quarantining and privatised companies monetising mental health and other services for the betterment and gain of personal greed than the contribution to us as human beings.

Despite COVID19’s detrimental impact on my mental health, I have been able to build inner resilience, and sit with my emotions and critical reflections. I have gained a greater sense of self in solitude and am thankful for the positive changes in human behaviour resulting in a more sustainable and just world. We are more than what we produce and consume.

COVID19 has not been all that bad. But we have had to sacrifice for great change in how we live, breath and sustain our Earth and human species.

By Matthew Jackman

Service User and Mad Studies Academic, Victoria University

Western Pacific Regional Representative, Global Mental Health Peer Network

Get in touch with me @

Read more from Matt here .

From lived experience to challenging the mental health burden in Uganda - Pavel Reppo of Finemind

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 10:06:00 GMT

Our ongoing series of discussions on 'leadership in global mental health' brings us this week to Pavel Reppo, Founder and CEO of Finemind. Pavel shares with us a courageous insight into his own experience of living with OCD, and explains how his organisation Finemind is challenging Uganda's troubling mental health burden through ,a peer-to-peer support system that empowers community members.

“One beautiful spring morning, a merchant loaded his donkey with bags of salt to go to the market in order to sell the salt. The merchant and his donkey were walking along together. They had not walked far when they reached a river on the way.

Unfortunately, the donkey slipped and fell into the river. As it scrambled up the bank of the river, it noticed that the bags of salt loaded on his back had become lighter.

There was nothing the merchant could do except return home, where he loaded his donkey with more bags of salt. As they reached the slippery riverbank again, the donkey fell into the river, this time deliberately. Thus, the salt was wasted again.

By now the merchant knew the donkey’s trick. He wanted to teach the animal a lesson. As he returned home the second time with the donkey, the merchant loaded bags of sponges on its back.

The duo set out on their trip to the market a third time. On reaching the river, the donkey very cleverly fell into the water again. But now, instead of the load becoming lighter, it became heavier.”

I love story-telling, and I’ve noticed that this story captures my experience with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) well. OCD is made up of obsessions and compulsions; by completing a compulsion, you quiet an obsession. In triggering this sequence, it may even feel rapturous; it’s relieving to fall into the “water” to rid the weight. However, it promotes dependence and fear. It sets the scene for long-term habituation, lack of control, and apprehension. The donkey’s repetitive action of falling into the water helps with the immediate problem, but only exacerbates the harmful impacts of OCD.

My earliest recollection of OCD was when I was 13 years old standing face to face with myself in the bathroom mirror. I would wash my hands for 30-40 minutes several times a day until they would crack and bleed. They began to resemble the leathery exterior of a football. My handwashing would go on day after day, weeks at a time as I was lurking for the ‘just right’ feeling. As a little boy, I was baptized Eastern Orthodox Christian and would pray nightly. On a perfect day, my prayer would last 5 minutes. On any other day it would last 45 minutes. If a bad or immoral thought found me, I would have no choice but to start from the beginning for fear of god striking me down. More recently, my experience with OCD masquerades cruelty as honesty. I think I’m doing the right thing by being honest with my thoughts, but it comes off hurtful – even malicious – to the person receiving them.

Nevertheless, I often say that the only silver-lining to me having OCD is the fact that I live in the United States. When you look at the rest of the world, the numbers are grim. Nearly half a billion people live with a mental illness. 300 million people live with depression. I’m convinced that both of these estimates are radically conservative because of a lack of screening mechanisms. There is an astonishing 90% treatment gap in low-income countries. Rooting down into Uganda (my place of work), there are 30 psychiatrists for a population of 43 million people. Uganda ranks 4th in Africa for suicide and 17th in the world. The country allots a mere 1% of their healthcare budget to mental healthcare. Access to resources, friends and family, and other supports have made my journey with OCD manageable, but still difficult. And if I think about countries like Uganda with far limited resources, I’m disconcerted. Finemind was born from a single email to global mental health guru, Vikram Patel. I traveled to Goa, India, rubbed elbows with some of the foremost practitioners in the field, and learned about the MANAS program.

The program was set up in Goa, India, between 2005 and 2010, to develop and evaluate a model for delivering treatments in primary care settings. The essence of the MANAS model was to facilitate the shift for mental health care from specialists to lay people within a primary care team, and thus improve the coverage and efficiency of treatments for common mental disorders.

I borrowed the skeleton of MANAS to found Finemind. Finemind supports community mental health in Northern Uganda through a peer-to-peer support system that recruits, trains, and empowers community members, including clinical and non-clinical, to provide people with what they need to recover from common mental health disorders. Our vision is to end the suffering from depression and anxiety for internally displaced persons and refugees.

We utilize an approach called task sharing whereby the few mental health specialists are reallocated to provide oversight, facilitation, and supervision, while a lesser qualified worker is empowered to provide the day-to-day supports. Specifically, our community health workers (CHWs) offer a collaborative stepped care intervention. CHWs offer case management and all non-drug psychosocial interventions with the aid of primary care physicians and a mental health specialist (MHS). Stepped care included psychoeducation, antidepressant therapy, Interpersonal Counseling (IPC), and if necessary, referral to an MHS.

https://youtu.be/8hb4NkmjvxQ

I’m proud to say that in light of the Coronavirus pandemic, our team of 18 trained CHWs are on the frontlines providing timely mental health counseling for the community of Agago District in northern Uganda. They are the frontline warriors of Finemind.

By Pavel Reppo

Interested in learning more about Finemind? Be sure to check out their social media along with some more of Pavel's features!

Website: www.afinemind.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/finemindorg/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/finemindorg/

Mental Health Camp in Post-Conflict Northern Uganda

Forbes Feature: How Can We Help Solve the Global Mental Health Crisis?

"I walked myself out of the dark, abusive relationship" - Prarthana's story of finding happiness

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 09:03:00 GMT

As part of our effort to empower and inspire the global mental health community, we are supporting people to share their lived (or living) experience stories. Today, Prarthana Sharma shares her inspiring story of finding courage and happiness through a difficult relationship.

At 16, I was in year 11, making memories with my friends before we would transition into our final year of studies, the following year. I was an outgoing, loud, rebellious teen. I had gotten into reading poetry through the inspiration of my literature teacher who was the most incredible woman with such a caring and encouraging personality. I had big dreams, dreams to write books and work with children as a psychologist. I wanted to be known and be someone important. I wanted to contribute to society in every way possible.

That very year I got into my first relationship. I had fallen in love with a boy from the same cultural and religious background as me and my family. We were from the same state and spoke the same language. To me, and many girls like me, you are considered lucky and “settled”. I thought the same, I was settled, this was it, he was the one for me and I was the one for him. It was a “match made in heaven".

The second month, he approached my dad, to tell him all about our relationship. The way I felt about this is questionable to me, currently. I was amazed by his courage and felt proud of his choices. This was when I decided that he was serious about us. He wanted this just as bad as I did. We were teenagers, how did we expect to know what we wanted? Well, we just did.

My father on the other hand, was uneasy but supportive. Being a strong, ethical immigrant man in his late 40s, he just did not know how to say “no” to his daughter’s wishes. But this boy on the other hand, did not understand the incredible relationship between his girlfriend and her father. My father worked hard to get my sister and I an exceptional education in a foreign country, whilst supporting our teenage dreams and wishes as we settled into the western culture “Go ahead but be mindful of your studies and yourselves” he said. Right in that moment, I wanted to throw my arms around my dad and cry in pain.

Three to four months into our relationship, he decided to dig a little deeper into my past, which to me or anyone was not an incredibly big deal. However, his views on my past made it seem like the biggest crime ever committed by any woman on this planet. It was against his morals and values. It was at this point that I got the first foretaste of abuse from my boyfriend.

He approached my father at our school grounds when we returned to school after term holidays, during which the disastrous drama about my past occurred. My father had found out about my past with the other boy. I arrived midway into the conversation after reuniting with all my girlfriends. I was unsure about what had happened when I arrived, but I noticed the unwelcoming, stiff expression on my father’s face, and a sense of victory and power on my boyfriend’s face. I would hear about this later on after school from my father, who would express his embarrassment and anger towards his young daughter. His idea was to dominate me, my father, everything and everyone that was in my life. He instilled fear in me and made me succumb to him, just as he wanted.

I was deep into the relationship and reached a point where I had forgotten all about myself, my studies, my interests and dreams. We had transitioned into year 12, the final year of secondary school. I slowly lost my friends and conversations with those remaining just felt forced. I was always dull, always tired, always drained, always anxious and afraid. I had lost an incredible amount of weight and was underweight for a 17 year old.

It is almost exam time; our school organised a farewell for all the year 12 students. All the students sat in the auditorium as they listened to speeches and watched presentations filled with memories. I sat down as well, right at the back, uncomfortable and lonely, next to a girl I did not really know, as I watched my boyfriend who was my only friend, boisterously mingling with his large group of friends. Everyone cried and embraced one another. I sat, still and stiff with a smile forcefully drawn on my face to appear happy in case someone questioned me. I was as empty as the busy Melbourne roads at midnight when everyone slept. My world was now different to everyone else’s. It was not a fun world.

Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention this relationship lasted seven whirly years. Seven years. A big solid chunk of my life. My boyfriend and I started to mature as adults whilst studying at the same university. I am still in love with him, but we are different. One day he loves me, one day he does not. I found myself pulling out a petal each day to help me decide how I needed to adjust to that day’s setting and mood – “he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not…” . The relationship dynamic became more controlling, demanding, expecting and aggressive on his part. I was always adjusting to him, catching up to him, cheering him on, supporting him, loving him, accepting him. I remember after every fight, I would cry so loudly and aggressively into my pillow, my throat would throbbing from pain and my head pounding loud in my ears.

My dreams, wishes, plans. Yet, I was still adjusting to new ways and new rules that he set. I was a victim to verbal and emotional abuse for a long, seven years. It was a whirlwind of gaslighting, toxicity, verbal abuse, ignoring for weeks, blocking and being emotionally violated. It was seven years of pretending to be happy, forcing myself to stay, making plans for future – to marry, and find new ways to adapt to his demands.

No one in my life ever found out about the abuse, except for the little girl within me. I had thoughts of suicide, thoughts of self-harm, I had thoughts of running away for good. The nails and skin on my fingers were brittle from biting them out of anxiety, my eyes were dark and lifeless. I was lifeless. But it was all too easy for me to put on a ‘happy mask’ and make him smile.

August 2019. I was fed up with him. I was nearly 23, a long way from being 16. I was older, mature and finally beginning to realise how unfair my relationship had been. I was kicking myself for giving into his power. I sat down and wrote a letter almost 10 pages long. I remember the intense ache in my hand and wrist, but I kept writing. I aggressively wrote down all the pain I experienced from him for seven years. I told my mother that I could not do this anymore. I sealed the letter into a tight envelope, wrote his name and address and posted it. Mind you, I made various attempts to talk to him face to face about all the issues on my mind because I was the self-claimed “fixer”.

It has been nine months now since I walked myself out of the dark, abusive relationship which added zero value to my life. Since then, I have ticked off things I had wanted to do but could not because of his orders and rules. I took up a Master of Counselling degree and reattached with my dream of working with children. I volunteered in Bali as a part of a mental health placement. I met new people, I faced new fears. I cut my hair. I cleaned my room. I bathed in hot steamy water to wash away the old scars, I read books, I studied and made constant plans. I connected with a new group of incredible women and embarked on a brand new journey. But most of all, I reconnected with my family.

Fast forward to the quarantine period for Covid 19, my family and I decorated our house, we bought rugs, couches, plants and candles. It is all still a work in progress, but I was finally home. I was finally present. I mean, I have always lived with my family, but the last 7 years felt like I was just existing in a house but not actually living in own my home. I was just there, dull and empty. My recovery from that relationship has been slow, but I am certain that quarantine has never been more enjoyable. I love being at home more than I ever did.

I took this quarantine as a positive note to learn a new skill, start working on a new interest, declutter my space and work on my previously planned but postponed assignments and projects. Honestly, most of all, I chose this time to be with my parents. We took time to practice self - care together, reflect back on our childhood whilst looking through old photos and make hilarious memories together. I have regained a new kind of strength by being in their presence. I cook new recipes for my family and we watch movies together. I am home! I am finally home! I am free! I am rebellious! I am back. My 16 year-old self is jumping for joy, the light is burning bright again. I feel like a kid again. Everything is better. I am happy.

By Prarthana Sharma

Read more on lived experience from our Global Lived Experience Ambassador Matthew Jackman here .

Interested in sharing your own story? Send an email to Matthew at matthewrjackman@outlook.com .

What we've learnt from our experiential learning opportunities

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 16:15:00 GMT

At GenMH, we’re passionate about capacity building in global mental health, much of which includes educational opportunities. One key example is the fellowship program we’re building, which is an opportunity for individuals interested in global mental health to engage in experiential learning in a new context. Experiential learning is essentially the process of learning by doing, and reflecting on what you did. This type of education is critical to developing competent, ethical and innovative professionals within the sphere of global mental health. Recently, our team was reflecting on our own experiences and wanted to share some insights with our community...

Liz, Chief Research Officer:

In 2016, I spent some time on a micro-finance project in the Shan State of Myanmar. Things were going well for the men involved, but due to a combination of factors, women weren’t benefiting from the project. I had relevant professional experience including prior work on gender-based projects, but am not from Myanmar and didn’t speak any of the local languages. Once I arrived, I spent the first few weeks listening, observing and talking to every person who was there before me. Pretty quickly it became clear to me that there was a local staff person who, with a little training, could do my job and do it better. I passed on my technical skills and after a few months, I left. The staff member who replaced me had now had more technical skills, as well as the cultural and language skills to do the job better than I ever could.

Every experience I’ve had since then has validated this, so wherever I go, I do my best to identify someone from the community to train and support until they’re ready to replace me. Before that experience, I spent years as a student confused about where the line was between “good” and “bad” collaboration. It wasn’t until I worked on that project in Myanmar that I really grasped how international collaboration can be practiced in ethical and productive ways.

Experiential learning taught me that while international collaboration is highly important in some contexts, it should be approached with great caution and an expiration date. Ultimately, when working in a context outside my own, I want to leave my colleagues better-prepared to take care of their community than before, not stick around forever myself. To me, I’ve been successful when I’ve worked myself out of the job, either by replacing myself with a local colleague or finding and implementing a solution that the local community can sustain without me. I’m happy to say that the person who replaced me in Myanmar has continued to build her career and is still supporting her community today.

Jackee, Founder and CEO

To me, experiential learning means learning by doing, and this is the best type of learning. Learning by doing gives you the intellectual freedom to test different types of research and practice, which you don’t always get in the classroom. My times of experiential learning have taught me the power of local knowledge. Experiential learning does not have to take place abroad, but when you are interested in global mental health, it can be helpful when it does. During each time I have been abroad, either for internships, fellowships, or study abroad, I have always lived with a homestay family. This has meant some of the best learning opportunities I could have asked for. By living with a local family, I could get first hand knowledge of the area. They helped me stay safe, they helped me learn, they helped me grow. One of my favorite experiences with my homestay families was getting to appreciate different foods. Every homestay had their own local cuisine that I could get to know through the best activity, EATING! I am forever thankful to the families that have taken me in and helped me understand their cultures better. And of course, it was always great to hear from them how much they appreciated having people from other cultures staying with them. For most families, I was not the first or the last visitor to stay with them from another country as they gained much joy and learning from having foreign visitors in their homes.

Sonali, Co-Founder and Chief Fundraising Officer

Experiential learning can be a frustrating process for someone who is most comfortable when grounded in the theories and rules of classroom learning. BUT (and it’s a big one!), it often ultimately provides the same outcome: you walk away knowing the same rules, plus with a bonus stock of life lessons in hand. A couple of weeks ago, a lecturer asked my class if anyone knew how to develop research tools. I almost piped up in excitement, as I had developed feasibility and acceptability tools a few years ago while interning in India, but I stopped myself. There’s no way I could actually know the formal process of tool-developing. All I’d done was learn on the go. Right?

Wrong. As it turns out, I already knew the entire content of what my fellow classmates spent the rest of the day learning. What’s better, is that because I’d learned it in practice, it was etched into my memory.

In a field like mental health, it’s especially important because rules of practice don’t always translate across contexts. The methods, systems, and cultures vary hugely depending on where you’re working, and these dictate the rules of what you’d be doing day to day. It’s similar to law: in order to practice in most countries, you need to be certified in that country and nowhere else.

So I’d urge anyone who is stopping themselves from an opportunity to learn through experience. If you know little about the area, that’s OK. The field can be a better teacher than you’d think.

Make sure to check out our other recent blog posts on Voluntourism and experiential learning!

Avoiding Voluntourism in the mental health sector: My experience and advice

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 10:05:00 GMT

At the grand old age of 22, I jumped at the chance to go and get experience in the Mental Health sector abroad. The one thing I have been asked the most since then, is how I knew to trust the organisations I did to go and get experience with. The truth of the matter is, I was so desperate to get experience in the field I had just spent 3 long years studying in, and so desperate to travel, that I didn’t think twice about who or where I was going.

Thankfully, my naivety did not negatively impact me, and I have since gone out with some amazing companies to volunteer in countries across Asia and Oceania. However, over the years I have volunteered, it has been put into perspective how and why companies can differ; not just in terms of what they offer, but also with regards their “ethicality.”

Voluntourism wasn’t something I had ever really even considered when I was young. Taking pictures with the children I had worked with abroad had never seemed an issue. It wasn’t until I went out to gain experience and volunteer as a Graduate that I really opened my eyes to what an “ethical” work experience provider could be.

This included things like:

I finally found that giving and helping more than I was gaining out of an experience, not only made it so much nicer, but also proved that voluntourism can be so dangerous. The fact that I have ensured that my work experience is gained as an aftermath of providing a service in the countries I work in, has made me all the more keen to continue helping others. And as a result, the dangers of being part of a voluntourism group are minimised. In choosing companies that follow the points I mentioned, I have protected not only my own safety, but that of the community members I am working with. For example, by not posting pictures of patients on Instagram, and by not spreading the names of hospitals and Psychiatric facilities, I am ensuring that these individuals are not stigmatised and singled out in their community. I am able to make sure that they will not be punished for having a mental health concern, and for having come for help. I also value the fact that the companies I have volunteered with screen and interview their volunteers. Thus safeguarding the communities they work with, to make sure their volunteers have a background in the field, a level of understanding and even some previous experience if possible.

So in answer to the questions I was so frequently asked - I know to trust the companies and NGO’s I do based on research of their work in the communities, the way they hire staff, and the publicity of their placements and service users. But not everybody is able to find an NGO to go and volunteer with. And in this day and age, it can be difficult to know which companies to trust and which companies to steer clear of, especially when money and fees are involved.

The best advice I can give - if you can only find “businesses” willing to give you experience in the mental health sector, check to see who they work with. The most ethical company I have volunteered for worked with already established NGO’s, Charities and Government run facilities in that country. That way, if ever the company closed down, or had to stop working in that specific country, it would ensure that the patients were still being looked after by the NGO’s, charities and government facilities. True they might no longer have the help of the business, but neither were any patients being left abandoned and back to square one.

Also, check to see if there is a charity branch to this small business. Just because they are operating as a business, doesn’t mean they aren’t giving back to the communities they work in in some way. Always check to see where your fees are going - how much is profit, how much goes on your costs whilst volunteering with them, and whether they pay their staff out in country.

So my advice to you is - RESEARCH. You can never ask too many questions before deciding to volunteer with an organisation. And remember that no organisation is going to be perfect, but as global citizens it is our responsibility to ensure that we undertake due diligence when embarking on a volunteering opportunity - whether domestically or internationally. Trust your gut, if something doesn’t seem right, your questions are being ignored or the organisations can’t give you answers, then you must do what you feel is right in that moment.

Read more from Kate here !

Volunteering? How to avoid Voluntourism and find Experiential Learning opportunities instead

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 18:38:00 GMT

As a student of International Development, a lot of my focus and interest lies in how the Global North interacts with the Global South (and vice versa). Of particular interest to me is the *issue* of Voluntourism, which denotes the growing trend of individuals travelling to developing countries to undertake volunteer work, most commonly, from the Global North. Voluntourism, while I believe not always intentionally, can be extremely problematic for a number of reasons.

Most commonly, Voluntourism occurs through non-profits or companies who offer exciting packages involving a mix of volunteering and tourism activities in exotic locations such as India, South East Asia, and Southern Africa. Volunteer activities range massively depending on the organisation, however they often involve working in settings such as schools or hospitals. While these activities allow volunteers to get ‘hands-on’ experience, in many cases, they can be extremely harmful to the communities they aim to serve. Firstly, volunteers coming from outside of the community setting they are volunteering in often lack the language and vocational skills they need to effectively and positively contribute to the community.

To add to this, having a continual flow of Voluntourists can be a serious impediment to the investment in, and training of local people to undertake the same work . For example, all the while a hospital can attract a free source of labour from the Voluntourism industry, they will be discouraged to employ a local alternative at a price.

Further, volunteers are often able to choose extremely short-term packages, sometimes as little as 2 weeks in length. This is problematic as not only does it take time for the volunteer to settle into their new setting, but it also takes time for the community they’re serving to get used to them. For example, some organisations allow volunteers to teach in underprivileged schools in the developing country setting for as little as two weeks. While this may be a valuable experience for the volunteer, for the children they interact with it can be confusing and disruptive. Essentially, Voluntourism, while often unintentionally, is designed to serve the volunteer, not the community they are volunteering in. That is not to say that individuals who have undertaken ‘Voluntourism’-esque trips should be blamed or shamed. I would actually argue that they are equally victims, as Voluntourism organisations are often extremely expensive, and can be somewhat misleading in their marketing efforts.

So then, what can we do about the situation? For people interested in volunteering abroad, or outside of their own setting, I would suggest that investing time in research is the key to avoiding the Voluntourism industry. Look at the organisation you’re thinking of working with, does it operate as a company or a non-profit? How is it accredited? How much money are they asking for? What are previous volunteers saying about their experiences? Investing time in finding the answers to questions like these is very important.

Additionally, I would advise any prospective volunteer to self-evaluate. What skills do I already have? What languages do I speak? What skills could I teach others? Remember that as a volunteer you want to be adding value to the community you are serving, not just gaining experience yourself. This could be through teaching local staff some IT skills or using your academic background to help get a community project published in an academic journal. Remember also that as a volunteer, the community you are working with must come first. While, for example, you may have dreams of working on the front-line of mental health clinical work in the developing country setting, if you do not yet have the qualifications required to do so in your own setting, you should not do so in the developing setting either. Sometimes taking the ‘back-bench’ is more appropriate. And while this may seem less exciting than working ‘hands on’ with patients, it may be more valuable to the community you are serving.

Finally, I would suggest you look for experiential learning opportunities. Experiential learning is similar to Voluntourism in that it allows you to gain practical experience, however it does so while also providing you with learning opportunities in order for you to make the most of your time. Experiential learning is designed to be mutually beneficial to both the volunteer and the community, as it invests time in preparing the volunteer to be ready for field work, while holding the needs of the community as precedent. Also, experiential learning doesn’t always have to occur in an exotic country, in fact, some of the most valuable experiential learning opportunities may be happening on your own college campus, your neighbouring community, or across the other side of your country. While your dream career may be in the developing country setting, there is certainly knowledge to be gained from your own context, and equally importantly, there are certainly communities in need in your own context too. So to sum things up, I would say that for anyone looking to build their experience through volunteering:

Finally, remember that no volunteering opportunity will be perfect , but as long as you are able to prioritise the needs of the community you are serving, and effectuate long-term and sustainable change, there will be value in the work you do.

Stay tuned for more on Voluntourism and Experiential Learning from members of the GenMH Blog Team!

Holding onto beams of hope in Mumbai

Fri, 17 Apr 2020 16:27:00 GMT

Co-Founder Sonali Kumar shares a poignant insight into life in Mumbai since the COVID-19 pandemic.

It would’ve been impossible to imagine eerily silent roads in a country of over 1.3 billion people, until now. In Bombay, outside my family home, stray dogs and cats wander about empty streets, wondering where the roadside food sellers (their meal providers!) disappeared to almost overnight. On 24th March, with 519 cases and 10 deaths at the hands of COVID-19, the government announced a 21-day lockdown. Because all public transport services were shut down, over a hundred million internal migrant workers were required to travel across state borders to return home by foot, forced to leave cities and jobs which provided for them day-to-day. People died of exhaustion and starvation. The government infamously mass-sprayed travellers with disinfectant, spurring anger and grief on social media. Amidst this, sectarian riots broke out in north-east Delhi, leaving 53 Muslims dead and thousands thrown from their homes, injured at the hands of Hindu mobs. The tragic conditions which left millions stranded were the same conditions which kept most of India’s middle class safe at home, “[quaffing] wine in comfort, while India’s poor are thrown to the wolves” as headlined in The Guardian on March 30.

Amidst these events came several beams of hope, which I have been clinging on to and trying to promote. Apart from cleaner air than we’ve had for a decade and reports of dolphins and whale sightings around our coasts, NGOs and individual families have rallied together to provide meal & hygiene packets for daily wage workers, migrant labourers, widows, street children and other vulnerable groups across the country.

One in particular, Youth Feed India by Safa Society, is a group of young people who came together to provide "relief kits” across 6 cities in India . Thus far, they have provided over 33,00,000 meals to over 2,30,000 people across India through 47,000 relief packages, and their tireless network of volunteers is nowhere near stopping. Check them out here, and donate, if you can: bit.ly/yfiketto

We are blessed to be safe, today and every day that other people are not. Trying to focus energy on good initiatives, I hope, will multiply that goodness. That must be very least we can do. Stay safe everyone!

Check out our other blog posts and stay up to date with GenMH by signing up to our newsletter here !

The power of sharing your story

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 15:01:00 GMT

Our Global Lived Experience Ambassador, Matthew Jackman recently sat down with GenMH Founder Jackee Schess to discuss the importance of lived experience leadership in global mental health.

As part of GenMH's effort to empower and inspire those with lived (or living) experience, Matthew Jackman is coordinating a section of our blog dedicated to sharing stories of hope from people around the world. Check out this snip-it from Matthew and Jackee's Q+A , where Matthew discusses how sharing your story can inspire, empower and give hope to countless people, including yourself.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/f1036a_19d6a84a4a6e4bdcb8b4a89daa078834/360p/mp4/file.mp4

If you're interested in sharing your story, please do reach out to Matthew at matthewrjackman@outlook.com . We have also prepared some parameters to help guide you through the writing process:

Focus your story on:

Also, don't forget to check out Matthew's own powerful story here .

Social distancing: We all cope in different ways

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 12:38:00 GMT

New addition to the GenMH Blog Team, Katriona Goodsell shares with us how she's been coping during the COVID-19 pandemic, and shares some advice for those struggling to settle into these new changes to everyday life.

It’s only been a matter of weeks, and already I shiver at the words “COVID-19.” Having dealt with nothing but enquiry emails about how this will affect volunteers, their placements, their plans and their futures, it’s all I can do not to scream at the mention of the words. I have to remind myself that this is normal, that what I am feeling, how I am reacting is valid. I’m not being a drama queen, not being selfish - I am just as confused and uprooted at this as everyone else.

So how come others are able to deal with the current lockdown more than others? ARE they dealing with it better than I am? Or maybe I’m relying on social media telling me EVERYTHING rather than realising that not everyone posts everything on social media all the time.

It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that, not only were my own dreams and plans drastically changed, but I now had to respond to everyone else’s worries about the situation as well. I could feel my mental health deteriorating, and fast. So what could I do?

There are hundreds, if not thousands of posts on various social media platforms talking about how to cope with isolation and lockdown - how to help you stay physically and mentally healthy during this strange time. Keep a routine, do yoga, workout, eat healthily……...but isn’t this everybody’s advice for non-COVID times as well?

I tried the yoga, tried the home workouts, tried the healthy eating. But still I could feel myself on the edge of something negative and extremely worrying. I have been working and studying remotely for over 6 months already, so it was time to try and figure out where the cause of my upset was coming from if it wasn’t my usual work environment.

And then it hit me. It wasn’t because I was banned from using the gym, or going to the pub or doing date night in a restaurant - it was because I had only focused on the negatives and not looked at the positives. And that was a personal problem for me.

Mental health is an individual thing, and so my reaction to the current pandemic is an individual thing. You can receive all the advice and help in the world, but that doesn’t mean you are going to find an answer. So yes, follow all of the influencers tips, the tricks for healthy eating, the sleep routines and the advice from family members. But if that doesn’t work, don’t panic. Remember that your feelings are your own, not anybody else’s, and if that means you don’t naturally solve your problems the same way everyone else is appearing to, that doesn’t mean there is anything wrong. It just means you need to listen to yourself, your own body, your own mind and take a minute to figure out what is best for you.

Finding stability during a time of global crisis

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 01:12:27 GMT

At GenMH, we want to share our own stories with a hope to empower, provide hope and give courage to the global mental health community, especially through this difficult period due to COVID-19.

Jackee, the Founder of GenMH, bravely shares how she has been feeling, with a hope to break down stigma, and empower others to talk proudly about their experiences with mental illness.

I live with bipolar disorder. This has meant an odd and frustrating journey during COVID-19.

About a month ago I started feeling an irritability I couldn’t shake. No matter what I did, I couldn’t focus on anything. I constantly felt like crawling out of my skin. I couldn’t sit still but I couldn’t really do anything either.

Turns out this has been tied to medication changes. I was too exhausted on my previous medication, so I switched to another one, which clearly wasn’t working. But this was not working at a new level. I generally tend towards depression, so this turn towards hypomania for weeks on end was odd.

Now me and my psychiatrist seem to have figured out that coming off of migraine medication may have been the culprit and I am slowly feeling better going back on this medication. My last appointment made me feel like a puzzle my doctor had to figure out, all in an effort to keep me off of lithium.

All I want to do is feel better, stable. I’ve known what stability feels like. With a combination of medication (which always made me too sleepy) and therapy, I’ve had bouts of stability. This is the most unstable I’ve felt in a long time.

But, then I remember what’s happening in our environment. I’ve been forced to move back home to the suburbs of New York City which is basically on lock down. We have no idea how long we’ll be self-isolating. We are all under incredibly stressful circumstances.

When I take a step back, I realize this is a time to breathe deeply and try to take some pressure off of myself. This looks different for everyone. But for me, this means not asking as much of myself on a daily basis… not expecting myself to get every single piece of work done, not expecting my normal level of “productivity”.

I’m also trying to take care of myself with positive distractions and positive coping. The best thing I’ve been doing for myself right now is working out, even 15 minutes a day. This has been bringing my energy level to a manageable place in the afternoons when my new medication seems to wear off.

So, GenMH community, I hope you are all doing well, and I hope you take a second to breathe and take some pressure off of yourself.

To all of our mental health in this tough time,

Jackee

Are you interested in writing for the GenMH Blog? Send an email to Jackee at jaclyn@generationmentalhealth.org for more details.

Transforming personal distress into global human rights advocacy in mental health: my story

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 01:29:47 GMT

In 1990, I was born into a family with a long history of emotional distress from convict resettlement in England, to the potato famine in Ireland, and ending with both families converging and settling in Australia. In 1996, at the age of six, I was removed from my mother’s care and began living with a foster family. We were removed from my mother’s and father’s care proceeding my parent’s divorce, resulting in my single mother’s deteriorating maternal mental health. She expressed her desire to end her life with her three children including myself, alongside my father’s violence at the time, and an unstable family income with limited support from my grandparents.

In 1999, at age nine, I lost my mother to suicide. I still remember the day I was told by my foster carers that she passed away, of which I had four foster carers within the space of four years. We were kept back from school by our foster carers, who requested we play arts and crafts in the dining room. I knew something was immediately wrong as were we taken by the social worker every morning for the one-hour long drive to primary school. The social worker closed the sliding door facing the kitchen to speak with my foster carers, and I could sense, and almost knew what was going to be shared with me. My foster carers and the social worker, who was a younger English woman, expressed their sadness in that our mother had passed away. I do not recall the detail of what was communicated, but I do remember crying for hours, maybe even days, there was a part of me that was relieved for her, as the last time I saw her was in a psychiatric hospital where she told me how much she loved me and would miss me. I knew deep down this was her saying goodbye, and to this day I wish I had that moment with her again.

I reread child protection case notes some years later, which identified I was an over parent-ified child and quite resentful at my mother’s lack of presence. Through my hyper-vigilance of responding to the trauma I began to behave out of survival and safety , socially engineering leadership skills and qualities necessary to protect myself and my younger siblings who I viewed as my children. I cared for them alongside with my father and grew up in significant poverty due to a lack of income security from the government, and the immense task of being a single parent. My father did an amazing job, and I hold no resentment towards him as he has transformed his life and become a family carer peer worker in a psychiatric hospital. In addition, after my mother’s suicide, I lost all contact with my maternal grandparents, due to the shame that they expressed over losing a daughter to suicide. The complexity of this situation was confounded in the fact that they blamed my father for my mother’s death. We bear too much pain for their own complex grief, loss and trauma as they lost their daughter many years prior to her passing. My grandmother had told my mother she did not want children, and to this day I question the circumstances from a feminist perspective to understand and forgive her behaviour in contribution of my mother’s mental health issues prior to meeting my father. I even question my grandmother’s sexuality and desire for having children, having felt forced like many women to have children in the early seventies. This picture paints an intergenerational and intersectional story resulting in a childhood littered with abandonment, abuse, neglect, complex trauma and grief. No wonder we developed mental health ‘dis’orders, it appears to be a healthy adaptation to consistent adversity.

The grief, loss and trauma I experienced were two-fold, as my brother lives with ‘Schizophrenia’ as defined by psychiatry and my sister lives with ‘Bipolar Disorder’ and ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ as defined by psychiatry. They are both beautiful, but sometimes their challenges overwhelm me, so I support them from a distance for self-care. Much of my adolescence and young adulthood involved advocating for their care, treatment and support with psychiatric hospitals and services, alongside other intersecting service systems that are broken, disjointed and uncommunicative. It appears intersectoral service systems such as housing and income security, are designed to entrench us in ‘dis’ability or diverse ability and disadvantage.

In 2020, I am living with what Psychiatry defines as ‘Bipolar Affective Disorder’ which has enabled transformative personal insight. I am a suicide survivor and almost took the path my mother had at a similar age. I thought I was going home to be with her. I now fear to live, I do not fear death. Severe and enduring mental distress often results in deep critical self-reflection, advanced empathy and spiritual enlightenment. I found myself through my adversity, I found my purpose, I found self-love, and I found out that I did not have to take the same path as my mother. At other times, my diagnosis caused distress for me and others. The medications adversely impacted weight gain, lethargy, tiredness and poor sexual libido, which are ironically all essential to gaining a sense of recovery. Then there were the hospitalisations. I have spent over six months of my life in and out of psychiatric hospitals and many more as a service user in the community accessing clinical community mental health services and psychosocial disability services. Although distressing and unpleasant, without the treatment I am sure I would not be alive. I view medication as training wheels on a bike and utilise them as needed when acutely distressed, where I know biomedical interventions are necessary. Through my diagnosis, I learned the importance of human connection and belonging, as this instils hope and purpose for living a meaningful life. Most of all through my lived experience I found my voice, I felt empowered and somewhat enraged by the system designed to address the genesis of distress – trauma – with an unfounded focus almost solely on the biomedical perspective. I thought this to be an epistemological injustice in how we privilege particular knowledge over others based on how effective we perceive objectivity to be in collecting social phenomena, which is a flawed hierarchy much like biomarkers in Psychiatry. Through my lived experience I developed leadership skills and a deep purpose characterized by a drive to be there for others in the pursuit of bettering humanity.

I applied this desire through study. Through my university studies, I enrolled in social work, as I was passionate about social justice and human rights. I graduated into forensic mental health supporting lived experience consultants for the forensic hospital and forensic community mental health service program. The consultants advocated for service users in a systemic advocacy role providing feedback to the executive and board who administered the forensic state-wide service. This work led to an interest in the lived experience profession and survivor movement, and the beginning of my passion for partnering alongside persons experiencing mental distress through my own journey.

The lived experience and/ or service user profession focuses on a critical sociological perspective in mental health, incorporating mad studies as the scientific knowledge base for our work. Its aims are focused on equity and justice and locate our distress in structural disadvantage and social determinants to health and wellbeing. Psychiatry is seen by most as an essential part of understanding distress. However, its focus and the power it holds is critiqued with a focus on social, cultural, spiritual, human rights and justice dimensions of aetiology and service delivery, which are presented as alternatives to psychiatry as a paradigm for practice. Partnering with others involves peer support, through empowerment and mutuality, and the sharing of story and personalized medicine to achieve change through equal relationships. This approach shifts away from expert and patient, and cultivates internal transformation through reclaiming a human being’s sense of power, hope, connection and identity which are often lost due to the impacts of distress and the iatrogenic adverse impacts of the mental health service system, societal stigma and discrimination. The pursuit of unpacking peer work as an emergent global mental health human rights profession has involved a deep desire to share my own story, but also to provide the conditions to make space for others to share theirs, particularly of intersectional disadvantage, and through this approach, we heal only personally, and also collectively.

With Senator R. Colbeck, Liberal Party, Australia

My personal, professional and academic experiences aim to elevate the voices of persons experiencing distress. I often utilise my social work professional qualification to subversively enter spaces closed to peers, and then promote the lived experience professional agenda once the system is safe. I have presented at multiple international events including the annual World Health Organisation Mental Health (MH)Gap Forum in 2018, representing the Western Pacific Region on the Global Mental Health Peer Network and the inaugural Global Mental Health Ministerial Summit in London 2018. At various global mental health spaces, including conferences and advocacy collectives, I have contributed to a human rights and social justice perspective with a focus on involving lived experience persons in high-level decision making and recruiting lived experience trained professionals who articulate the critical sociological perspective from disability rights and justice movement discourse. I have been effective in influencing prominent global health ministers on the impact of inequality on population-level mental distress and general health outcomes. I currently represent the lived experience voice on the National Advisory Panel for the Australia Association of Social Workers encouraging critical sociology perspective and alliance with the peer workforce in Australian public mental health systems. I recently returned from Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, where I represented the youth mental health voice at the launch of the United Nations Youth Report presented by our Australian ambassador Kareem El-Ansari. I spoke to fifteen ministers and senators of parliament about the importance of focusing on structural determinants in politics such as equity, justice and poverty alleviation as central to solving a significant proportion of mental distress.

Presenting at the MH Gap Forum World Health Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, September 2018.

Today, I am a Global Human Rights Activist in mental health. In addition, I am drawing on the survivor movement and professional academic discipline of mad studies incorporating a strong disability justice lens. I complete an International Diploma in Mental Health, Human Rights and Law at the Centre for Mental Health, Law and Policy at the Indian Law Society which was co-designed by the World Health Organisation for global mental health advocates, and am returning as an Associate Lecturer in global mental health peer work as a human rights discipline in late 2020. I am fortunate to have complete Project Returns two month Certified Peer Specialist training in Los Angeles, USA, where I interned with the Chief of Peer Services at LA County Mental Health Department, assisting in developing a Recovery Policy framework and peer workforce development. I aim to complete my current Juris Doctor in Law and my PhD unpacking lived experience, service user and peer work as the emergent human rights discipline in global mental health. I currently work as a mental health clinician at the Department of Veterans Affairs specialising in trauma, and lecture at Victoria University in the Bachelor of Social Work program encouraging emerging social workers to connect with their values, which emanate predominantly from intersectional lived experience. Alongside work endeavours, I volunteer with the Global Shapers as part of the World Economic Forum.

With Senator J. Steele, Green Party, Australia

I have found my purpose and strengths through survival, resilience and growth from complex grief, loss and trauma. My ‘illness’ and mental distress have been a neurological diverse gift from the universe, and most probably a gift from mother in spirit who I absolutely embody and live my life in the dedication of alongside my siblings. I have photographs of them all by my bedside to remind me of my purpose and drive for the work I do every day. I learnt through peer work training that I can share these gifts with others to cultivate connection and hope. Illness is one lens of my story, transformation and growth through distress is another, which is a narrative the Diagnostic Statistical Manual and/or International Classification of Diseases does not unpack. We need alternatives to Psychiatry and to challenge the systems and institutions of oppression that treat us with no dignity or rights. We all want the same outcomes, therefore we need collaboration through attention to power and equity in the mental health and broader systems.

Thank you,

Matthew Jackman

Get in touch with me @

Global Mental Health Peer Network

Whatsapp: +61449957376

'All countries are developing countries when it comes to mental health'

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 03:21:52 GMT

What inspired you to work in the mental health field?

It was the urge to understand and help people that drove me to become a psychologist. Mental suffering is, paradoxically, something that everyone experiences, but at the same time people consider it mystifying and feel very little qualified to do anything about it - in themselves or in others. I wanted to know more about the mystery that lies within us, and learn how to do something about it in these cases when it brought people anguish and sadness.

What inspired you to work in the mental health field?

The field of global mental health represents the same to me as above, but on a larger scale - the scale of the whole world. In the past few years we have seen that people everywhere recognize the call for action on mental health, in all the countries and territories, despite the field of global mental health being more delineated in high-income countries. Therefore we should not consider global mental health as something to do to/with 'developing' countries. It has been rightly remarked that all countries are developing countries when it comes to mental health. We all stand to learn a lot better how to manage the vast needs out there. Usually, people would say there are gaps of treatment, prevention and promotion. I would say there are also needs for connection, empathy, understanding, mutuality, helping - the purely human mixed in with the scientific.

The field is still young and seething with opportunities, voices, messages and possibilities. There is place for everyone.

What advice would you give a young person interested in entering the global mental health field?

Think, participate, read about mental health and the interdisciplinary debate - in that order. Wherever you are, there are opportunities. I hope our field will soon develop in a direction where it won't matter where in the world you are, because you can connect to global mental health people everywhere. Find a way to contribute - this is how I started my website globallyminded.org and my list of global mental health events. Keep your passion and your conviction that things can be changed for the better.

Are you interested in writing for the GenMH Blog?

Reach out to Liz at liz@generationmentalhealth.org . We have some exciting plans and would love input from diverse people from across the world!

Jemma Moody on recognising culture in mental health practice

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 03:14:06 GMT

Check out our latest addition to the 'Perspectives on Global Mental Health' campaign.

We hear from Jemma Moody who's career in global mental health has taken her from her home of Australia, to a range of diverse areas of the world! She acknowledges the need for the field of global mental health to be adaptive to the diverse needs of different cultures and communities globally.

What inspired you to work in the field of global mental health?

Over a decade ago I was volunteering with people seeking asylum in Australia. I was struck by the enormous impact displacement had on mental health and the challenges newly arrived refugees and migrants faced. This was the moment that sparked my career as a social worker. Upon leaving Australia and working abroad I observed how displacement led to disrupted education, trauma, loss and grief, anxiety and depression and dislocation and disconnection from family, community and home. It has become increasingly clear to me that at the heart of recovery and healing at an individual, community and global level is action around mental health – interventions, services, awareness raising, dialogue. Finally, over the years, I have found that working with children and young people is where I am called to practice. They are our future and when we support their mental health and wellbeing we may contribute to a more inclusive and connected society.

Photo courtesy of Jemma Moody, Australian social worker pictured here in Chennai, India

What does global mental health mean to you?

To me, global mental health is the field of mental healthcare that first and foremost, views mental health as a universal right. Global mental health practitioners advocate and provide services to ensure all people, regardless of culture, ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality or ability, have access to services and opportunities to have their mental health needs met. It is a cross-cultural perspective on mental health that priorities local knowledge, strengths and expertise, ensuring that recipients of mental healthcare are active participants in their treatment and recovery.

Global mental health is not, and should not be, the imposition of one type of mental health practice onto another culture or community. Every society, every community, every family, every individual is different. We interact with the world through an intersection of our identities and these perspectives, histories and expertise must be the cornerstone of how we work with mental health at a global level. What is effective in one culture will likely not translate to another in its entirety, just as what works one day may be unhelpful the next. Global mental health requires us, as practitioners, to be flexible, adaptive, curious and humble.

What advice would you give a young person interested in entering the global mental health field?

Find a mentor or supervisor. I am constantly seeking out individuals and organisations with expertise and a wealth of experience in the contexts in which I am working. My mentors have guided me through cultural differences and ethical dilemmas and have encouraged me to continue to learn and grow as a practitioner. All mental health practitioners have an obligation to continue to learn, seek out new information, understand local practices and interventions, develop cultural competency and much more. My advice would be to reach out to practitioners and experts. Ask questions. Engage in supervision. And stay curious.

To find out more about Jemma Moody and other of our Peer Advisory Board members, check them out here .

"Global mental health means connecting with one another through our humanity"

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 03:07:41 GMT

Continuing our 'Perspectives on Global Mental Health' campaign, we hear from Matthew Jackman, an inspiring rising member of the global mental health workforce.

Based in Australia, Matthew discusses how his own experiences have impacted his career aspirations, and shares with us his understanding of what global mental health means.

What does global mental health mean to you?

What inspired you to work in the mental health field?

I was born into a family that had many intergenerational mental health issues. I lost my mother to suicide aged nine whilst being removed from her care and living with a foster family. I cared for my two younger siblings with dad and grew up in significant poverty. The stigma of mental health resulted in losing my mother’s parents, grandparents, who had to deal with the shame and guilt of losing their daughter. Their grandchildren, including myself, bared too much pain in their own complex trauma and grief.

Through university I studied social work as I had a passion for social justice and human rights. In school I gravitated towards sociology, psychology and politics. I graduated into forensic mental health supporting lived experience consultants for the forensic hospital and forensic community service program who advocated for patients and clients in a systemic advocacy role. This led to an interest in lived experience work and the beginning of my passion for working with persons experiencing mental distress.

My own experiences have lead me to presenting at the annual World Health Organisation mental health Gap Forum , consulting with Harvard Medical School in Dubai on non-specialist mental health workforces, representing the Western Pacific Region on the Global Mental Health Peer Network, consulting WHO on a range of documents and representing the lived experience voice on the National Advisory Panel for the Australia Association of Social Workers.

Photo courtesy of Matthew Jackman, Australian social worker and mental health advocate.

I have undertaken several peer work trainings in Australia and the USA, including a world leading two month program at Project Return in becoming a Certified Peer Specialist. I have also almost completed an International Diploma in Mental Health, Human Rights and Law at the Indian Law Society designed by WHO for global mental health advocates.

I aim to complete my Juris Doctor in Law and PhD in mapping global mental health networks and understanding how the vulnerability of lived experience leads to transformative leadership in global mental health.

What advice would you give a young person interested in entering the global mental health field?

A career path sparked by working at a government hospital in India

Thu, 08 Feb 2001 02:49:58 GMT

Our campaign 'Perspectives on Global Mental Health' is still open, however we have already received some truly insightful entries from people across the world who are working in or around the field of global mental health.

First, we hear from Tejaswi Shetty , who is based in India, as she shares her own experiences and advice for those aspiring to work in the field.

Global mental health is a relatively new field which strives to develop equitable, accessible quality mental health care worldwide. The focus is on reducing the mental health care gap – especially in low resource settings. Global mental health is not limited to just provision of care, but also expands into advocacy, research, policy and programme development. Global mental health to me means preventive mental health programmes as well as equal access to quality health care no matter where you are from with the hope to support mental health well being. To me, it also includes a top-down bottoms-up approach where policy shapes practise and practise guides developing policies and laws.

Joining the field of mental health was completely by chance. I always found understanding people and witnessing their stories as interesting. But what sparked my desire to be in this field as a practitioner was my experience as an intern in one of the government hospitals in India. What I saw there completely shook me and got me thinking about how I could use my interest in the field to have a meaningful impact on people’s lives.

One distinct interaction was with a young girl who had been abandoned by her family after she was diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. She shared the dismal conditions under which she was living – with no access to sanitary pads or basic hygiene facilities. She described how despite being in remission, she could not leave the hospital as no one had come to take her home. This consolidated my hope to work in mental health with a practice that centred around human rights and individual agency; and to influence change both at large scale levels as well as in individual practice.

I think when you are looking at mental health from a global lens, it is important to acquaint yourself with mental health statistics. It is essential to look at data and arm yourself with factual knowledge from different regions and places– to understand the information about prevalence rates of mental disorders, percentage & efficacy of resources already allocated, and gaps present in systems. Only when we know what is working and what is not can we advocate for certain systems of care or practices or for increasing certain interventions. Another thing to keep in mind is that to work in mental health is to work with poverty, education, class, caste, and race. Society cannot be separated from the person , and its important to be aware of the intersection between mental health and other systems in society.

And lastly I would say – don’t forget to listen to stories. It’s important to recognize and support local knowledge of healing and develop culturally appropriate systems which are experience-near to the people they serve. This can only be done when we listen to people from different places, and different cultures with diverse experiences.

Are you interested in writing for us?

We are looking for people passionate about global mental health to share their perspectives! Send an email to liz@generationmentalhealth.org for more information.

The GenMH Blog by Generation Mental Health

In Conversation with Maalvika Bhuvansunder, an IBD Patient-Advocate

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Reflections on Advocacy & Global Mental Health

Looking Ahead

Offscreen, Not Offline: The Hidden Cost of Constant Notifications

The Illusion of Digital Detox

Your Brain on Constant Anticipation

The Psychological and Physical Cost Beyond Distraction

Psychological Costs

Physical Costs

Can we really just “shake it off”?

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Shaking for emotional catharsis…

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How Social Media Anxiety Affects Youth

How Social Media Brings About Anxiety

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We all have emotions

Lingering sadness

An honest glimpse into the healing process

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PostCode Unconference

Ethics Versus Algorithm

How does my social media account make you feel?

What mental health content do we need? Can it be joy?

Attendee’s Note

Fellowship Diaries: GULI on World Mental Health Day!

This World Mental Health Day, GenMH sponsored GULI's powerful Mental Health Sensitization Seminar at Egerton University Main Campus.

Breaking the Silence on Suicide Prevention - A reflection

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Where did it all begin?

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Why Evolved Relationships?

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Our Offering

About the author ﻿

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"looking back to what the team and I achieved, I could not be more proud of what we accomplished"

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What is advocacy, what is it really?

Money Makes The World Go Round: On The Intersections Of Your Bank Balance And Mental Wellbeing

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For Me, Self-love And Healing Began At Home

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Work, employment and lived experience

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The lack of work-life balance

Lived Experience, Storytelling, and Mental Health: How can we be Agents of Change?

My Wellbeing is Political: A Page from My Pandemic Diary

Anju looks back at the second wave of the pandemic in India & recounts the distress caused.

I told the whole office I have schizophrenia. Here's what happened.

"People like us are dehumanized in the media a lot. So we want to begin by humanizing ourselves.”

We don’t have the words: On the inadequacy of our mother tongues to communicate about mental illness

We need to talk about self-harm

TW: Discussions of self-harm and suicide

What Being Part of a Global Mental Health Conference Really Means

Experiencing Grief during COVID-19: A Perspective

“Change is the only constant in life” - Heraclitus

About the author