Lashkar police station in Pune camp has become the site of an initiative that addresses an often overlooked issue: the mental health of children in conflict with the law. For the next month and a half, Marathi-speaking therapists, psychiatrists and doctors will conduct 90-minute workshops here, twice a week, to help these children address aggression, anger and other related issues.
For this, Pune The police have collaborated with a city-based startup, The Full Circle, which provides professional care and personalized solutions for daily stress management, mental well-being and developing self-care practices to cope with challenging life circumstances through online sessions.
“These children are in conflict with the law because they have not been well prepared or they have gone through so much trauma that it is very difficult to handle them. What we are trying to do with the minors is to calm them down and empower them so that they do not go down the wrong path again. This is a stepping stone for us to have a better community. We start where it is already hindered,” says Nupoor Mohan, founder of The Full Circle.
Mohan, an alumnus of the Indian School of Business, is the founder of another startup, Flexisales. With both parents as doctors, he saw tensions in medical care during the COVID-19 pandemic, when his father set up a 200-bed hospital. “I realized that people didn’t even have time to mourn the loved ones they had lost. There was a time when people didn’t even come to claim the bodies that were in the hospital,” he says.
A personal crisis in Mohan’s life plunged her into a deeper awareness of the scarcity of institutions that look after people’s well-being. “What if someone is going through a difficult phase in life? It can be financial stress or mental stress. It can be a relationship problem or having lost your parents. I felt the need for a brand where one can easily approach and get experts to help them get through that journey gracefully. In India, mental health is still a taboo topic,” says Mohan.
Fill the mental health gap
The Indian government defines mental health as “the emotional, psychological and social well-being of an individual.” The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare states that “between 70 and 92 per cent of people with mental disorders do not receive adequate treatment due to lack of awareness, stigma and shortage of professionals. According to the Indian Journal of Psychiatry, India has 0.75 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, while the WHO recommends at least 3 per 100,000.”
Full Circle is fighting mental health challenges in the country by entering spaces where it is not normally looked at. They are working to collaborate with Bombay Police will reach out to victims of rape and domestic violence cases, where an intervention can help survivors find their strength and dignity again.
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“These are some conscious collaborations that we are working hard on. In the last few weeks, we have seen a lot of suicides in the corporate sector. Therefore, we are aggressively targeting B2B companies on the importance of work-life balance, among other factors. We want to be there with HR as the corporate sector goes through layoffs or layoffs, so that these are handled more emphatically,” says Mohan.
To make mental health a priority and talked about at school, the company collaborates with banking institutes on emotional and holistic mental well-being and with top-level schools and institutions that have more than 1,000 children. “We are in an era where there is so much going on in everyone’s personal life. How much does this impact children? We want to be there for the workshops. We want to be there so we can talk to parents. We want to be there so we can train teachers to, for example, identify a happy child who has become very quiet,” says Mohan.
An important part of the company. budget is invested in the creation of content. An internal content team of 20 people works on generating posts to raise awareness. “My main vision for the company right now is to let people know where to go. We also have a podcast channel, where we invite top leaders, from politicians Supriya Sule to business owners and co-founders. Once a leader talks about making therapy very normal, the crowd accepts it,” says Mohan, adding that next on the agenda is to disconnect the services.
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