Veena Ail lives in Mumbai. Her older daughter committed suicide as a teenager. She had battled TB and appendicitis in the past but left no clear explanation for why she took this step. Mrs Ail shares the pain of losing her daughter to such tragic circumstances and urges parents and schools to be more attuned to their children's mental health.
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Dr Harish Shetty is a Mumbai-based practising psychiatrist. He is known for working with a variety of groups, including youth, survivors of disasters and the police force. He has trained thousands of professionals in different areas of mental health including prevention of communal riots. He is also a researcher and a therapist.
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| Website: www.mindmoodsandmagic.blogspot.com
Aruna Prakash lives in Mumbai and has recently released Yaadein, a collection of memoirs in Hindi. She suffered from depression after her children went abroad to study and work and was led to the brink of suicide. She battled her depression and continued her fight even after the accident where she lost her husband and sustained major injuries. She has hosted two popular radio shows on Jaago Mumbai, a community radio network. She has also taught life skills and English to students of nursing and has been involved in conducting cancer awareness and detection camps for women for the last 30 years in Mumbai, and other cities in India and abroad.
Yatin Nadkarni is an ad film-maker based in Mumbai. After a relationship went sour, Yatin battled depression and attempted suicide. After being helped by a friend, he decided to live and focus on the goodness and beauty of life. He volunteered at Samaritans, a suicide prevention helpline, for six years and has also made short films on social issues for NGOs.
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| Website: www.yatinnadkarni.com
Ratna Chibber is a technocrat entrepreneur running a company in Chennai. She is also a caregiver to her brother who is diagnosed with schizophrenia. He lives and works with her as well. She strongly advocates employment to rehabilitate and reintegrate people with mental illness to mainstream society and has provided employment to many such individuals in her company.
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| Website: www.atmanirbhar.com | www.theaashafamily.org
Dr Sudipto Chatterjee is a psychiatrist associated with NGOs Parivartan Trust and Sangath. He leads the Jan Man Swasthya and INCENSE programmes that work in various parts of India in developing innovative community mental health services. After finishing three years of working as a senior registrar at NIMHANS, Bangalore, Dr Chatterjee moved to Barwani in Madhya Pradesh where he set up an innovative community mental health programme in extremely resource scarce settings that has subsequently been replicated in many other low-income countries in Asia and Africa. Subsequently, he has worked in various senior capacities in India and internationally including with the World Health Organization as a consultant and has helped design mental health services in India, and in other countries.
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Seema Jain, an MSc in Biology, gave up her job as a school lecturer after 10 years, to look after her sister who is mentally challenged and has schizophrenia. As a caregiver, she has undergone enormous strain while looking after her sister who is prone to extremely violent behaviour. Currently, she conducts yoga classes to support her family. She also runs Prabhat (House of Hope), an NGO for special children and mentally ill children and adults. She hopes to build a daycare centre and a permanent home for them someday.
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Dr Santosh Chaturvedi is a professor of psychiatry and Head, Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore. He has been at NIMHANS since 32 years and he has to his credit more than 400 scientific publications.
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Milesh Hamlai is the Founder of Altruist, an NGO based in Gujarat that works in the field of mental health. Under a unique programme, ‘Dava and Dua’, implemented by the organization, religious faith healers have been sensitized and trained on mental health so that they can refer people with mental illnesses for medical treatment, in addition to performing religious rituals. Another programme, ‘Aadhar’, works towards rescuing people with mental illnesses from the roads and ensuring that they get medical treatment, care and security at the mental health hospital in Ahmedabad. Once they start recovering, Mr Hamlai and his team establish a rapport with them and try and reunite them with their families.
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Sister Lucy Kurien, Pandit Shamubhunath Shukla and Saiyed Chhotamiya are religious leaders, advocates and practitioners of ‘Dava and Dua’, a treatment model that encourages people with mental illnesses and their families to seek psychiatric treatment and not just rely on faith healers and religious rituals for their healing.
Dr Hamid Dabholkar is the Founder of Parivartan Trust, an NGO that works towards providing effective and easy-to-access services for persons with mental illnesses. By profession, Dr Dabholkar is a consultant psychiatrist based at Satara with a keen interest in community mental health. He is involved in developing innovative service delivery models for patients with mental disorders which are low-cost and easily available.
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| Website: www.parivartantrust.com
Dr Madan Kataria, a medical doctor from Mumbai, is popularly known as the ‘Guru of Giggling’ (London Times). He is the founder of the Laughter Yoga Clubs movement in India that started in 1995. It is considered to be the fastest growing movement for health and happiness providing thousands of people with several health benefits.
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| Website: www.laughteryoga.org