I was always obsessed with studies and wanted to become a topper in my school or college. I always planned to ace competitive exams after school. I began preparing for the IIT-JEE exam when I was merely in Class 7. I also attended an institute for the preparations of IIT-JEE and scored well there too. I used to study 50 to 60 hours a week.  

With so much pressure regarding the studies, I stopped giving time to any other activity. This affected me internally, and I started feeling low most of the time. I began to notice changes in my behaviour. I started losing memory and gradually lost interest in everything that I used to do earlier. Earlier, I played football, drew, did graphic designing and videography, but then I could barely remember how I used to enjoy those activities.  

I didn't have a lot of friends, and I considered my girlfriend to be my best friend. For reasons unknown to me, she disappeared one day. When your social circle is that small, losing one person is a great loss, and it hit me quite hard.  

One day while crossing the road, I was hit by an auto, and it twisted my back. It led to months of lying alone in a hospital bed, injections in my back and nobody to talk to. I was sixteen at the time. Despite all of this, I managed to top my intermediate exams and cracked my JEE mains. During this phase, I was back with my girlfriend, and it gave me comfort to feel that everything was back to normal.  

I was then diagnosed with Eosinophilia, which is a disease that affects your immune system and in turn, your memory. At the time, I was in my first year at college, and there had already been seven suicides. In a place that has only the cream of the crop, the realisation that there are people that can outdo you is very overwhelming.  

When all of this was going, I was having problems with my 'girlfriend'. She refused to visit me in the hospital. All of this was getting increasingly difficult to bear, and I ended up taking several sleeping pills to try to end it all. However, I was upset that it didn't work, in hindsight. I faced a lot of unpleasant side effects due to consuming sleeping pills.  

I recovered. I cleared my SAT with an amazing score and was ready to leave the country and start afresh. However, we could not afford a loan, and I went back into my shell.  

That was the day I decided I had no way out, yet again. I watched one of my peers from the university dying by suicide in front of my eyes. The experience of seeing somebody end their life in front of you is difficult to put in words. But it was the day I realised the actual number of people going through this struggle, and I wanted to do something about it for others, if not for myself.  

Seeing that guy jump scared me enough to back off and run downstairs. Before this, I thought my family would be happy to have me gone since I was a failure anyway. But at that moment, I realised that ending my life would be a true failure.  

I began taking care of myself again, put on some weight, started exercising, and researched. Over the span of a year and a half, I taught myself the workings of business until I had enough to launch my start-up.  

In May of 2020, I launched a website, findhope.in, that would provide others with a place to speak with a trained peer counsellor without any judgement. It is completely free, and our counselors are all final year psychology students who are ready to begin their own journeys as counselors. It is kind of a win-win situation as it works as an internship and exposure for them, and as free support and a helping hand for those in need.  

I could scale the platform to help around 5000 youth and soon realised that it was scalable but not sustainable. Coming from a Middle class family, I couldn’t bootstrap the platform any longer so I picked up a management consulting role and paused findhope for a year.  

We have restarted findhope in Aug ‘22, with a full-time core team and some seed fund from the Government of India (under MIETY 2.0 program), we hope to disrupt the student mental health scenario by creating a symbiotic relationship between tech and psychologists, where a WhatsApp bot would provide emotional first aid to students dealing with distress and then refer to a psychologist if needed.  

We realise that the market has changed drastically post pandemic but we are disrupting the market by providing therapy at subsidised rate of INR 300 per hour by using the funds we raised. In the future, we plan to make colleges NEP Compliant by partnering with them and impart psycho-social skills and therapy support to their students. 

This story was first published by The Logical Indian here