Working Towards a Happier Future

Working Towards a Happier Future

The Happy Company

In this day and age of technology and everything new, we seem to still be stuck on the old idea of mental health.

A study conducted by the World Health Organization in 2015 shows that one in five Indians may suffer from depression in their lifetime, equivalent to 200 million people. Now due to various factors like stigma, lack of awareness and limited professional help, only a fraction of these people are being helped.

The majority of the populace when asked what mental health according to them is, stated terms like ‘retard’, ‘stupid’, ‘mad’. Now, it is not their fault that they think like this, the older part of the population grew up in a time where stress was low and life was slow paced.

Life is much busier now, people are more stressed, and be it the schools or the workplace, the amount of mental work has increased exponentially.

But our brains can work at such a pace only for so long before tiring, and rest isn’t an option. There are deadlines to reach, projects to complete and tests to study for and therefore, our lives have become so hectic that we often forget to take a break.

The world changed, our mentality didn’t. Take a minute and think of the following situation:

You were playing with your friends one day and ended up bruising your knee, you hid it as fast as you could, what if someone saw it? You rushed home, hiding your wound from everyone, you don’t want to be judged. You try to bandage it yourself, try to hide the pain because you know that this pain is much better than the one you’d get if the society knew of your injury.

Seems weird, right? Why would anyone be so paranoid because of a simple physical injury? Well, now replace that with depression, anxiety or any other mental disorder. Get it? This is the society we live in today. One where you have to hide your pain because it’s better than being judged.

A very famous argument I’ve heard is ‘show me where it hurts’, people won’t believe mental illness because they can’t see it. Here is where awareness comes into play. Once something is shared enough, people start to talk about their own experiences with it and through this mutual connection that thing or topic is normalized.

A study on people’s attitudes towards those affected showed that 41% of people agreed that talking to a mentally unhealthy person could deteriorate the mental health of a healthy person.

This mentality is what needs to be changed, everyone at some point in their lives feels stressed or anxious and while it is okay to feel so, what elevates these feelings is repressing them. Communicating with others is a crucial part of mental health, it is healthy to vent out from time to time as this helps in getting rid of the emotional baggage we carry around.

Now as I mentioned before, not everyone is fortunate enough to have a safe space to vent out how they feel and here is where we come in, The Happy Company. What we do is simply give others a safe space where they can vent out their feelings anonymously without the fear of being judged.

All you need to do is send in a hi to our page (@to.a.happier.world) and the admin will assign you a volunteer. To put it in simple words, they are like your friends, always ready to lend an ear. Even after you’re done venting, they check up on you every week to make sure you are fine!

It’s a cruel world out there, and we have but each other to get through it. Everyone has problems and no one should have to go through them alone. Remember that there is always someone out there who is willing to be there for you, it is only a matter of reaching out to them.

Let’s all work towards a happier world!