Article: Before Crisis: Why India Needs Emotional Education, Not Just Helplines

 

-Tanvi Singh, Mental health Activist, Founder of Leap of Foundation

 Sometimes I find it strange that conversations around mental health have grown so much, yet emotional understanding still feels absent from ordinary life.

People today are more familiar with terms like anxiety, burnout, depression, and emotional exhaustion. We have more helplines, more awareness campaigns, and more conversations encouraging people to seek support. All of that matters deeply. But most of these systems still step in only after someone has already begun falling apart.

We are slowly learning how to respond to emotional crises. We are still not learning how to prevent them.

A lot of people grow up learning how to hide emotions before they ever learn how to understand them. Children are taught how to achieve, adjust, behave, and endure. Very few are taught what to do with disappointment, rejection, shame, loneliness, confusion, or grief.

Slowly, this disconnect starts feeling normal.

And perhaps that is where the issue becomes even more layered in India. Emotional expression itself is often not nurtured while growing up.

In many households, people are taught to tolerate emotions far more than they are taught to process them. Silence is associated with maturity. Functioning despite distress is praised as strength. Vulnerability, on the other hand, is often dismissed as weakness, oversensitivity, or attention-seeking.

Over time, people stop checking in with themselves altogether.

Stress becomes routine. Constant exhaustion begins to look productive. Burnout slowly starts getting mistaken for ambition.

And maybe that is why the growing distress among young people feels particularly alarming today.

Recent NCRB data has shown a sharp rise in student suicides in India over the past decade, with reports indicating a nearly 65% increase between 2013 and 2023. (Source: Times of India, based on NCRB data)

Behind these numbers are individuals trying to navigate pressure, comparison, uncertainty, and isolation without fully understanding what they are carrying internally or where they can safely place it.

What makes this even more ironic is that many Eastern philosophies were originally rooted in prevention rather than reaction. Practices like meditation, breathwork, chanting, silence, and disciplined living were not designed merely as responses to suffering. They were ways of maintaining balance before life reached a point of complete inner collapse.