Team Health Collective


The Health Collective is a trusted source of content around Mental Health and Mental Illness, with an India lens. We have been ad-free since we started in 2016, have shared 450 stories, and co-authored the 3-book Mindscape series as well as Life Interrupted: Understanding India’s Suicide Crisis. We have worked with incredible contributors, artists, people with lived experience, mental health professionals, peer supporters and journalists. Do check our work out and let us know if you want to support us in any way, so that we can continue to commission original stories (art and text), as well as do more in our Indian languages. 


Amrita Tripathi

Amrita Tripathi is the founder-editor of The Health Collective and a partner at The Collectif . She has 18 years of work experience in the media and as a published writer. Her novels, Broken News (2010) and The Sibius Knot (2015) deal with the darker side of urban realities. She has co-authored the Mindscape series of books with leading psychologists — Real Stories of Dealing with Depression (2019) with Arpita Anand, Young Mental Health (2020) with Meera Haran Alva, and The Age of Anxiety (2021) with Kamna Chhibber. Tripathi co-authored Life Interrupted: Understanding India’s Suicide Crisis (2022) with Dr Soumitra Pathare & Dr Abhijit Nadkarni. She tweets @amritat and @healthcollectif. Read More by Amrita here

 


Abhishek Kumar

 

Abhishek Kumar is a partner at The Collectif (2020); He has more than 20 years of experience in the media, working in venture capital and as an entrepreneur. He tweets @akumar2408

Our Journey: 

Working with trusted mental health experts, we started step-by-step six years ago, to list out the basics you need to know; aggregating a list of helplines/ resources available, as well as vetted psychologists and psychiatrists, so that when you need someone, you’ll be able to find someone trusted close to you. The Health Collective is privileged to be consulting with leading psychologists and psychiatrists — from Dr Amit Sen of Children First, Dr Achal Bhagat of Saarthak, to Dr Samir Parikh of Fortis Healthcare, to Kamna Chhibber (Head, Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences, Fortis Healthcare), Meera Haran Alva, Arpita Anand, Varkha Chulani, and Prof Vindhya Unudurti of TISS, Hyderabad and many others, whose interviews and articles feature on our site. 

 

FRIENDS OF THE HEALTH COLLECTIVE

 

Tanmoy Goswami

Tanmoy Goswami is a user-survivor; fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford; and the creator of Sanity, India’s first independent, reader-funded mental health storytelling platform. Tanmoy is an advisor to the Keshav Desiraju Indian Mental Health Observatory, and a jury member for the SIREN awards, India’s first journalism prize for reporting on suicide. His work has been cited across the international media. He credits The Health Collective, where he wrote one of his first journalistic pieces on the topic of mental health, with giving him the conviction that this work is urgent and valuable. Read and see more by Tanmoy Goswami here

 

 

Kamna Chhibber Heads Mental Health for the Department of Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences at Fortis Healthcare. She is a trained therapist working with children, adolescents and adults. She is passionate about working in the space of child-adolescent mental health, relationships, trauma and abuse. She designs and creates programs for implementation in schools, corporate organizations and NGO’s that are directed towards enhancing mental health and well-being. She is a writer and author of books and is regularly featured in publications on issues pertaining to mental health and is a TedX speaker. She has played a significant role in enhancing the awareness and understanding pertaining to mental health within the country and is a well-known expert on issues relating to mental health.  Kamna Chhibber is the co-author of The Age of Anxiety (2021) with Amrita Tripathi. Read More by Kamna here

 

Dr Karan Thakur

Dr. Karan Thakur serves as the Group Sustainability Lead & Vice President – Public Affairs for the Apollo Hospitals Group, Asia’s largest integrated healthcare provider. Dr. Thakur is a seasoned healthcare administrator with wide experience in the field of health policy, hospital operations, projects, health communications and healthcare sustainability.

In his current role, Dr. Thakur is part of the Group’s expansion initiatives, public policy engagement & sustainability initiatives. Based out of New Delhi, Dr. Thakur is a well-respected columnist and podcaster who has covered subjects ranging from health policy, healthcare reforms and growth and development of the Indian healthcare ecosystem.

Dr. Thakur is an alumnus of the Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and National Law University, New Delhi. He was the 2022 Global Fellow from India for the Eisenhower Fellowships & the recipient of the Thomas B. McCabe Fellow recognition. Read and see more by Dr Karan Thakur here

 

Sunalini Mathew is a journalist who has worked across publications such as The Hindu, Reader’s Digest, Women’s Health, Prevention, and Child, with by lines in Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, and Good Housekeeping. She has experience in editing, writing, PR, events, and social media, and has also worked in the development sector leading a team of communications professionals.

Having worked extensively with international publications, she is conversant with delivering content based on brand guidelines and style sheets. At The Hindu, she introduced a series of mental health stories from a user-survivor perspective to benefit those going through similar experiences and to raise awareness about mental health conditions.

 

Ayushi Khemka pic

Ayushi Khemka (she/her) is the creator & co-founder of Mental Health Talks India, an initiative that explores the questions of mental health through the lens of lived experience, centering on socio-political systems and structures. Being a person with lived experience of depression and anxiety, Ayushi actively creates more dialogue on what mental health truly means in terms of people’s everyday experiences. She is driven by the desire to end the use of jargon in mental health discourses and root them in the languages and realities of the every day.

When she is not writing on all things mental health, you can find her playing the role of a PhD student in Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include, but are not limited to, gender based online violence, ethics of social media, digital humanities, computational social science and social determinants of mental health. She has an MPhil in Women’s Studies and an MA in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She can be reached via Twitter for GIF-generated rants @jittery_glitterSee more by and with Ayushi Khemka here

 

 

Solo is a Calcutta/Bangalore-based writer and cartoonist. Bored with a very successful career in advertising, she recently quit all the money and sexism to pursue her dreams – which include sleeping, playing with her four cats and raging on the internet.

See more here

 

Adwaita Das

 

Adwaita Das is the author of Quantum TangoColours of Shadow27 Stitches andSongs of Sanity. Their art features in various publications and illustrated series, includingYoung Mental Health with The Health Collective and Divine Darkness by Black Bough Poetry. They have worked in theatre, news, advertising and filmmaking. As creative facilitator, inclusive and innovative, Adwaita applies spoken imagery to address trauma and share tools of peace.

More by Adwaita here 

 

 
Vandita Morarka

 

Vandita Morarka is a frequent contributor and is the the Founder and CEO of One Future Collective. She’s an independent policy consultant, legal researcher and gender rights facilitator. She tweets @vanditamorarka

Read More work here

Devanik Saha

 

Devanik Saha is a frequent contributor, and is interested in issues around mental health, maternal health, and gender. He is a MA Gender & Development graduate from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK and a PHD candidtae. He tweets @devanikindia.

Read More work here

Ratna Golaknath

 

Ratna Golaknath is a senior psychologist, adviser to the Health Collective and regular contributor. She has worked with Saarthak for close to a decade. Her Instagram handle is Mental_Health_Reminders
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Sukanya Sharma

 

Sukanya Sharma believes that mental health needs more significant dialogue today. From a History graduate to an advertising professional to contemplating careers, she is still finding her rhythm. She is also a wildlife enthusiast, a PADI scuba-diver, and an amateur trekker.

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Pia Alize Hazarika

 

Pia Alize Hazarika is an illustrator primarily interested in comics & visual narrative. Her independent/collaborative work has been published by Penguin India (The PAO Anthology),
COMIX.INDIA, Manta Ray Comics, The Pulpocracy ,Captain Bijli Comics, Yodapress, Zubaan books and Khoj Artists Collective. You can find more of her work here. Her original comics and art from Pig Studio feature on The Health Collective.

Read More here

 
Merryn John

 

Merryn John is Kishore’s partner-in-crime and full-time resident ninja who occasionally moonlights as a graphic designer and comic colourist. She is specialised in branding, packaging, and graphic design.

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Kishore Mohan

 

Kishore Mohan is a part-time dreamer, full-time artist, and impulsive wanderer, His cartoons and comic strips have been appearing in national dailies since 2008. Kishore has directed animation segments in the several movies and continues to work as a creative consultant and a pre-production/concept artist in the Indian film industry. You can find more here.

Mostly Sequential is an independent publishing firm that dabbles in design and visual development services and began as an ode to Merryn and Kishore’s love for comics and graphic novels.

Read More here