In India, the conversations around mental health & wellbeing are still not normalized. There are limited or no avenues for children or young adults to discuss their problems openly and freely. They often feel scared to be judged by others and let their emotions pent up, which is extremely unhealthy. To exacerbate this, with the pandemic, most young people in need are stuck indoors with even fewer avenues to talking openly and discussing their fears and apprehensions. Due to this, there has been serious cyberbullying and even suicide cases by children and young adults.

The Gurugram Hub aims to focus on initiatives to improve the mental wellbeing of the youth (children & young adults). This includes building a mental health Chatbot, organizing webinars on topics pertaining to digital violence and online security, anxiety and depression, and positive mental attitudes as well as creating an effective social media campaign (#mentalhealthmatters) to spread mental health awareness and initiate and normalise conversations focused on mental health.

Key Highlights

• Creation of Chatbot: hub members will be able to analyze the data from the chatbot to track engagement as well as identify areas of intervention


• Webinars on mental health awareness for children, teachers and parents


• Dedicated workshops for children, teachers and parents on specific topics like cyberbullying, digital violence etc. with action-oriented outcomes


• Focused group sessions with limited children (separate sessions for boys and girls) to understand the existing root causes of mental health including online security, dating violence, depression and stress owing to COVID-19 etc. Special focus on ways to improve the overall mental wellbeing by tackling some of the issues


• 26 days of mental health: campaign where for each letter of the alphabet we mentioned one mental health issue everyday for 26 days 


• Youth mental health summit: To commemorate world mental health day, a youth mental health summit was organized led by mental health professionals on 10th October, 2020. Read more here
  

Impact

• Over 2500+ students, young professionals, teachers attended the summit


• Bilingual campaign in collaboration with the Panama Hub


• 1000+ engagement across all social media platforms


• Collaboration with 5 Indian hubs and 12 organizations for outreach