Support Groups In India To Help You Navigate Grief

In the complex journey of grief and loss, finding a community that understands and supports your experience is invaluable. For Indians, both within the country and abroad, accessing culturally sensitive support is crucial. This guide details a few support groups that we curated on TheMindClan.com that cater to various aspects of grief and loneliness.

Understanding Therapy Approaches

When finding a therapist, one of the most common confusions you may experience is when you see a therapist listing their approach in therapy. Whether you’re looking to start therapy for the first time or are looking to re-start therapy with a new therapist, understanding your therapist’s approach is key in finding a value-sync in your relationship with them in therapy.

No, your organization doesn’t need to hire a full-time or onsite therapist.

Prioritizing employee mental health is important in the workplace. Many companies offer in-house therapy to their employees to ensure that they’re getting the care they need. The most common reason is to help them cope with their work-related stress. Therapists can also help with other issues, like improving communication skills, managing feelings, navigating conflicts with colleagues, and addressing personal emotional concerns.

Thought starters for your organization for Pride Month.

In observance of LGBTQIA+ pride month, many organizations across the world have made efforts to be more inclusive and welcoming to the LGBTQIA+ community. Some have created rainbow flags and stickers to display in their lobbies and offices, while others have held events specifically for queer and trans* employees. These celebrations are an important reminder that all individuals should be treated with respect and dignity, no matter what their sexual or gender identity may be.

Feeling Your Feelings, And Learning To Process Them

Emotions are an integral part of our human experience. It’s normal, natural and healthy to experience them on a day-to-day basis. Emotions can be a response to what we see, hear, feel, or think. There are many factors that influence our emotions and feelings such as our current moods, thoughts, memories and meaning that we make of events around us.

Recognising, Acknowledging And Negotiating With Anxiety

A guest post.

Hi. Did you not know that Anxiety is a killer?

What a dainty name she has, and a chatty persona. But she eats me up from the inside. She grows as she feeds on me; from being a slender shadow lurking behind the folds of my brain to becoming an alter-ego who takes over in my place when things get tough. As I grow weaker, this hostile takeover unfolds even when things aren’t that tough perhaps they’re just loud. Anxiety has sharp ears, you see. She catches every little crack, and some that are yet to be sounded. She observes more keenly than an elderly uncle sitting alone in the park. And what she sees and hears, she amplifies and projects to me an expert story peddler that she is. While drowning my senses in this cacophony, she takes over.

When she takes over, I lose myself for a few moments. The parts of me that are not her disappear in a snap.
But my insides fight back, despite their weak knees and muscles fatigued from constantly being curled up, stiff and uneasy; despite the short breaths that are drawing just enough oxygen to sustain. This is not a glorious fight like the ones that you see in movies. In fact, this makes me wonder how any fight can be glorious. But that’s for later.

Just like my rambly train of thought, this internal fight that I have with anxiety is also a twisted and messy affair. The helplessness and confusion I feel about it implodes into me and bubbles up, constricting my throat. Even air needs to be gulped down with effort.

There is little I can be sure of when I’m living with her. I realize that my perpetually sweaty palms that cant hold onto anything, and sweaty feet that make it impossible to get a grip on any surface are a wicked allegory to my uncertain life.

By draining me with these internal battles every day, Anxiety ensures that I cant accept external help. PLEASE LEAVE I scream to well-meaning people around me. The faint voice inside me that says Yes, I need help is swiftly countered with But you don’t even know if or how they can help you. How can you expect someone else to understand what you don’t.

By this point, I cant differentiate between her voice and mine. I give up, resolving to fight my own battles.
This singular voice then grows louder, and tells me things I think I had known all along: You are insufficient; you are a burden; you are the epitome of mediocrity; there’s nothing you are good at; there’s no one who genuinely likes you, you should be invisible; you are a terrible person; you should be ashamed of all your privilege; you make no difference to the world; you are unhealthy; you are dying; humanity is dead; the planet is dying; there’s no point to anything, why don’t you die?

These chants ring in my ears every day until I have become deaf to those around me saying reassuring words. Usually, they become background chatter and get filtered out.

But every once in a while, something a friend says breaks into my trance, like a patronus throwing off dementors which are sucking the life out of a person.

Patronus charms are odd you have to remember the happiest moments of your life when you’re facing an agent of death it takes all your will to do that. Many times, you’d simply succumb. But thankfully, my Anxiety is not as hasty as a dementor, and likes to devour me slowly.

So I’m practicing my patronus, with the help of mental health professionals: to ground myself when she is taking over, to question her fallacies when she whispers into my ear, and to accept help on some days. Ive learnt that this imps powers wane when she is confronted, listened to and reasoned with.

I don’t know if I will ever completely get rid of Anxiety. She has been inside me for so long, perhaps a dearly held souvenir from childhood when my anxious mother brought me up. But I try to not let her run amok. While I may fail on some days, I gain a new lease of life on the days I succeed to tame her.

Did you know that Anxiety is a killer?

But I’m becoming better at taming her, clammy hands and all.

A collection of pieces

A guest post.

O K A Y

There’s no answer to whether it is a good thing or a bad thing to be merely okay. On some days, that’s all we have. We have to make do. Okay is not necessarily a comfortable space. For me, it definitely isn’t. It is weird, platonic, a straight line.

MhWHY

A guest post.

Over the past year, I was working with women situationed in a fragile, perilous situation, one that people without privilege so often find themselves in. This was in a therapeutic context, & the first thing to hit me when I went in there, was that their ’needs’ could not be more removed from the so-called domain of mental health. This was a systemic issue, a societal failure, one that required patriarchy to be addressed and policies to be changed.

Wither away slowly

A guest post.

I watched the love of my life wither away slowly 

A bright red sticky note

A guest post.

The world i see is a dull shade of grey that covers the walls of a sad and lonely hospital hallway leading to the morgue. My world is, in fact, just like those walls. Holding days and nights of painful cries and worried thoughts.