Rashi, Pooja, and Aarushi – Women of three different generations created a Safe Place for Mental Wellbeing – My Safe Place
“When we get some physical health issue, fever so to say, we don’t think much before reaching out to a doctor or a physician for meds, but when it comes to mental health, when it comes to our brain, we forget to think of it as a part of our body, why do we think so much before seeking the help of a psychiatrist?” – Rashi, Co-founder, My Safe Place. My Safe Place is an organization started by 3 women, who are mental health advocates, driven by personal observations on the need to remove stigmas around mental health. Interesting is the fact that three of them (Rashi Kumar, Puja Kumar, and Arushi Luthra) belong to three different generations. These women have collaborated for creating a safe place for mental wellbeing – My Safe Place.
About the Co-founders
Rashi Kumar: Rashi is the sum total of the age of the other two founders, Puja and Arushi. She has been an entrepreneur for the last 10 years and behavioural science is her key strength. A Masters in Psychology, she firmly believes in the power of the mind.
Pooja Kumar: With the hope of making healing therapies accessible to all, Pooja is a creative professional in platform and community building. She has a dual degree in Business and Psychology, making her a perfect fit for the organisation.
Aarushi Luthra: She is a graduate from Imperial College, London, in Biomedical Science and Management. Aarushi hopes to break the stigmas associated with mental health disorders, and with My Safe Place, she is using her advocacy for the same.
Read more: Mental Health for Parents: How to Keep a Check On Your Parents’ Mental Health?
How My Safe Place Helps people have access to mental health services
Our first and foremost service is to connect people with mental health professionals online, ensuring complete confidentiality and convenience. Then looking at the need for awareness for mental health, through social media, we also try to spread knowledge by sharing relevant and relatable content online. Alongside, we look at the softer modalities like art therapy, anxiety management, mindfulness, etc, and curate sessions for that. The third pillar can be that we offer support groups, which provide personalized solutions and a safe place for reflection and discussion.” – Rashi Kumar.
Mental Health and Women: We Wonder Women Campaign
“Through the participation, we received in our multiple programs, we have realized that a lot of women are talking about very similar challenges, about family, work-life balance, etc. So, around Jan and Feb, we decided that we want to better understand what are the challenges of women, and exactly are the common issues that they go through, and also what kind of support do they need. Since women’s day was approaching, so we thought why not start a campaign for women. So, we decided to celebrate women’s day the whole month. The campaign was named – ‘We Wonder Women’.” – Aarushi Luthra. She tells that the basic aim of this campaign was to actually encourage other women to speak up too, to reach out if they need help.
Mental Health is exclusively available and expensive, My Safe Place’s comment on this
Pooja says “Unfortunately, Mental Health is exclusively available, and expensive for sure. A single therapy session can be for around 1500-3000, and if there are successive sessions then there is definitely a good enough amount people are required to spend and which is not possible for everybody.” But adding to it, she said that there are a few possible solutions for the same which can include the fact that some therapists do offer sliding scale and group therapies which are not very expensive. Then there are support groups which is also a community-based model where you can learn how to cope with the people around you who have similar experiences like that of yours. And at My Safe Place, we are also trying to involve companies to focus on the mental health of employees and give them budgets for mental well-being or collaborate with us for services as a core part of their culture”
Talking about their message for the people going through rough times, Rashi concluded with just a simple phrase, “Reach out, we are there to listen” which quite decently sums the whole conversation.
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