If you struggle with a mental health problem, like I did, don’t be ashamed of it. It really takes a lot of guts to wake up every morning with that shit feeling, the sleep disturbances, the appetite changes, mood swings... it’s all disturbing. If you can find the strength and help to face it all, believe me, you are a warrior.

Participation in Mann Mela offers the opportunity to share your experience with a large number of young people and to build awareness about the positive aspects of mental health. Your contribution can also inspire more young people to come forward and share their own stories, letting them know that they are not alone and helping to break down the stigma associated with mental health.

Mann Mela tells young people’s stories from across India. The personal experiences you will find in this digital museum tackle common misconceptions about mental health, highlight common problems, and share information on help-seeking, building resilience, and how to make mental health one of our biggest assets.

Stories in our museum were identified through public calls for voluntary story contributions.

Story contributors worked with our team of writers and artists to bring their experience to life. This process consisted of interviews and discussions, collaboration between each contributor and our team to identify key themes, a storyboard, media format and included many rounds of feedback before arriving at the final piece you see in the digital museum. Our process followed a ‘person-centered’ approach, meaning the contributor’s experience and feedback was considered of paramount importance and central to the design of the media piece.

Stories are shared in the Mann Mela digital museum and will be featured on our social media channels.

Your personal information and interview notes, recordings and transcripts will be kept private and confidential by our organization. Interview documents will be kept securely in password protected files. 

In case you chose to remain anonymous, i.e., unless you share explicit and written permission for us to use your name or other personal information (like your age, gender, organisation/college, etc.), these details along with any other personal details will not be shared publicly. A pseudonym (a different name) will be assigned to your story if it is showcased at the museum or online. If we write a report or give talks about this project, we will not use this personal information.  We will only talk about what we learned from the project put together.

Your story matters, and we will do our best to help you find a platform to share it. Due to a limited number of exhibit spaces at Mann Mela, we are unfortunately not able to feature every contributor’s story ourselves. However, please be assured that our team is using a very careful process of inclusion to make sure that different kinds of individuals and stories are featured. Your submission may be selected to be transformed into different types of media formats for Mann Mela or for It’s OK To Talk.