Is it All in My Head?
MENTAL HEALTH AND EVERYDAY LIFE
Closes for Contributions on Dec 31, 2022
Lead Author: Antara Choudhury
“But therapy is just like going to the gym, but for mental health” - This was the gist of a conversation that I had with a friend of mine a couple of weeks back. While there is a lot of focus on improving your physical health by going to the gym, kickboxing, or doing pilates etc., there is little to no awareness of what you can do when you are going through a mental health crisis. At the core of this is the thought process that mental illness is a fabricated concept that only people who are not resilient enough admit to suffering from.
“You are just being lazy”, “Do you still not feel better?”, “Do some yoga” and so many others reach us as day to day advice. The fact remains that, no matter how aware and advanced we think we have become as a society, sensitization on mental health and ‘safe spaces’ continue to elude us. So what do you do when you experience a low phase in life that no one seems to be able to empathize with? Most of us, in lieu of therapy, tend to reach out to friends or mentors to just talk about what we are feeling at that point in time. For a lot of us especially in South Asia, seeking help beyond these individuals is not only expensive but also looked down upon. This goes back to the idea that since mental health and mental illness are not quantifiable by using a thermometer or any other device, it is not worth talking about or caring about.
So where do we go to ask for help? Help to deal with what we are going through, help to convince ourselves that maybe getting professional help is not that scary after all, or even just to vent. This book seeks to compile experiences of real people as they navigate their mental health journeys while navigating various aspects of their daily life - a workplace, a home, a relationship and the like. The idea is to help you by opening a window into our worlds and helping you see that there is a precedent or similarity to what you and I are going through and by doing this, ensure that you do not feel alone in your time of need. This book will serve as a medium to understand how people with similar experiences and similar societal backgrounds, typically in their early twenties to late thirties, have dealt with mental health issues while managing expectations of the unique life situations that they are a part of and their journey of personal growth that has happened as a result.
The book aspires to be a guide to all those who wish to take affirmative steps towards addressing their mental health concerns.
If you’re interested in contributing to this book:
Introduction to the Book
Coming soon!
Meet the Lead Author
Professionally, Antara is a Manager in the Startups and Innovation practice of PwC India. She has 6 years of consulting experience with significant exposure in cross-functional teams across PwC India. She is part of the team that helped teams in PwC India understand and develop different models to scale-up and co-create with startups. Personally, she describes herself as a constant work-in-progress - learning, unlearning, and re-learning every step of the way. She has been on her own journey with mental health over the past two years and believes that more is less when it comes to dialogue and access to verified sources on mental health especially in the Indian context.
She believes it is always good to have a friend when you are going through the journey of coming to terms with the way you feel, identifying your triggers, and eventually building capacity to be able to deal better with those triggers. So she looks at this book becoming that silent but empathetic friend to several others who are struggling to articulate what they are going through especially in the absence of a physical manifestation of the problem.
Antara currently lives in Hyderabad and is passionate about social entrepreneurship, skill building and mental health and volunteers with organizations like the Global Shapers Community, Jagriti Sewa Sansthan, and the School for Social Entrepreneurs in India amongst others.
