Mental health NGO launches ‘Stories from a Pandemic’, podcast focusing on the youth

Stories from a Pandemic was created through conversations with 40 youths across India about their experiences of coping with grief and loss, managing productivity, understanding how to prevent suicide and navigating social media.

Mental health NGO Sangath recently launched ‘Stories from a Pandemic’, a podcast that features young people’s firsthand experiences of living through Covid-19 and how we can look to the future with hope.

Stories from a Pandemic was created through conversations with 40 youths across India about their experiences of coping with grief and loss, managing productivity, understanding how to prevent suicide and navigating social media. Stories captured through a series of online focused group discussions and individual interviews conducted between December 2020 and March 2021.

Produced by a team of young researchers, mental health public engagement specialists and artists, the podcast emphasises that the Covid-19 experience offers us a historic opportunity to examine a range of challenges related to how young people live, learn and work, and transform our approach to addressing their mental health concerns for the long-term.

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The podcast features voices including global expert Prof. Vikram Patel, suicide-prevention expert Dr Soumitra Pathare and UK-based clinical psychologist Eleanor Hodgson, and is hosted by Sangath’s It’s Ok To Talk programme director.

“Through the inspiring experiences of young people in this podcast, we learn how you can turn such a situation into something positive by becoming involved with community action…” says mental health Professor Vikram Patel in the opening episode of the podcast, which is available on Spotify and the Mann Mela website.

“Young people are one of the most adversely impacted groups and yet their stories have been entirely left out. Our research showed us that young people have in fact made very insightful and important learnings on how to cope and support others around them, despite the circumstances…” said Pattie Gonsalves, a mental health researcher and campaigner.

Stories from a Pandemic is part of Sangath’s Mann Mela mental health web museum. Mann Mela is a museum of young people’s mental health stories from India by Sangath’s It’s Ok To Talk initiative, which in 2019 was recognised as one of the 10 most prominent international mental health campaigns by Facebook and featured in a World Economic Forum report in 2020.

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