Article by: Swathya C.
Picture this - it’s 3:00 am and in the dark gloomy room, a girl is hugging her soaked pillow while struggling to stay sane as her breath slips away from her, in wails and gasps. She reaches out into the world in hope for some support, but all she gets is the icy realization that she has no one with her, not even herself.
With each breath, her chest feels heavier and heavier, and this sinking feeling that she had been feeling for a long time is worsening. She is utterly afraid, helpless and alone.
This was me 8 months ago in the first week of January and let me tell you, life wasn’t exactly
beautiful. I had been struggling with depression for almost two years by that point, and severe
anxiety had slowly crept up into my life in the second half of 2019. Panic attacks were the norm as I would stay up late at nights, to study and wallow in self-pity. I wanted to run away - far, far, far away, but alas, I had no escape and as I kept drowning myself in the sea of pessimism, my self-imposed academic stress started killing the worn down and desperate me.
However, that night, something remarkable happened. I had an epiphany as a spark lit up inside my mind that would eventually evolve into a fervent fire, initiating the healing of my soul. I was introduced to Carl Jung’s philosophy of shadow and ego by BTS’s song “Interlude: Shadow” and as I lay on my bed thinking about how I had always suppressed my shadow, my dark side, I realized what I needed to do to finally find some peace. I promised myself that I would never discard an unlikable side of me as a version that is not me, and welcome any and every aspect of my personality with open arms, be it the broken me, the rude and mean me, the silly me or the elated me.
That was how I started to heal, but that wasn’t the only promise that I made to myself that night. I reflected on all my experiences where I had tried to reach out to various adults around me for help in the last couple of months. My mother, my school counselor, a therapist I knew and even my teachers had looked the other way when I had courageously approached them for some sort of professional help.
I had never felt so wronged as these were the people that I was supposed to count on, but they had left me alone, either taunting me or calling everything ‘just a phase’. My friends were all I had, but tell me, how much can an untrained person help? They were obviously there for moral support and encouragement, but they had their own lives to take care of and honestly, life as a teen is hard and as my friends like to say it, ‘everyone is dealing with their own stuff’.
While I was sorting through all these thoughts and painful memories, a strange
yet exciting question popped into my mind - What if… teens can be a better support for each
other than adults? After all, they understand what their peers might be going through. And that was how I was reborn, with a wild passion for working to the best of my capabilities to
prevent any struggling teen around me from going through what I did, alone. I started planning a teen-led initiative and kept ruminating that idea in my mind for the next three months until I felt ready to make a move and transform all my hopes into my reality. In April 2020, we finally launched Road to Nepenthe just a couple of days before my 17th birthday, and since then, we’ve been unstoppable.
Road to Nepenthe is a mental health organization for teens, run by teens that felt the need to
improve the support extended to struggling teens and destigmatise the topic of teen mental
health among the adults around them. Our name ‘Road to Nepenthe’ means a journey towards a state of well-being while healing along the way.
We believe that such a journey can be extremely painful and through this endeavor, we want to reach out to teens like us, who are in the search for their own ‘nepenthe’, i.e., something or someplace that can make them heal from their grief and suffering, and lessen their pain. Our main aims are to inform teenagers about various mental health issues, provide support to those who are struggling and raise awareness among adults and teens about the prevalence and severity of teen mental health issues by staring healthy conversations on these topics among them.
When we started initially, we didn’t expect too many people to join us or support us as mental
health is a pretty taboo topic in India. However, to our surprise, we got around 70 applications for team members within just 4 days of releasing the forms and received lots and lots of interest in our future plans! As we set up our team of 48 teen volunteers and started working on our projects and articles, all this love from the community motivated us to pour our heart in soul in everything we did so that we could bring about a change in the life of at least one teen around us.
So far, in the exhilarating 4 months that we’ve been here, we’ve undertaken a wide range of
projects, which include a month-long self-care challenge, an ongoing mental health awareness
series, as well as a huge pride project that included talking about the history and importance of pride month, the mental health and violence faced by the LGBTQ+ community, and this
concluded with a virtual pride and a special video interview series. We also launched our own voice and chat support group with the help of psychologists and are conducting webinars on various topics every weekend to reach out to as many teens as possible.
In the midst of all this, I’ve slowly started to find myself smiling as I am renewed with a powerful sense of purpose, and that is to serve. I believe that this is the case for several members at Team Nepenthe as well because in the process of helping others find their own paths to healing, we end up discovering a little bit of that pixie dust ourselves and get one step further away from all the pain and suffering.
Everyone has their own ‘Road to Nepenthe’ I have found mine right here, beside my team, through the revolution that is mental health advocacy.