On a winter afternoon at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2026, in a packed Surya Mahal, a deceptively simple question hung in the air: How do you know when you’re not okay?
The answer is: Not when you’re broken. Not when things have fallen apart. But earlier, when life tilts, nerves fray, sleep thins, and the mind begins to feel just a little too loud.
The panel, titled ‘Where Is My Mind?’, brought together psychiatrist and global mental health pioneer Vikram Patel, mental health entrepreneur Neha Kirpal, journalist and author Amrita Tripathi, in conversation with Puneeta Roy, founder of The Yuva Ekta Foundation.
Between them sat decades of clinical research, lived experience, storytelling, and public advocacy, and a rare willingness to talk about mental health without fear, jargon, or drama.
‘DON’T PATHOLOGISE BEING HUMAN’
Vikram Patel, who helped draft India’s first National Mental Health Policy and has spent years reshaping how the world thinks about care, began by gently pushing back against the instinct to medicalise distress.
“The first thing to do,” he said, “is never pathologise a negative emotional experience.”
Sadness, fear, anger, anxiety — Patel reminded the audience — are not symptoms to be erased but signals to be listened to.
“Every single negative emotion has an evolutionary origin,” he explained. “It has an adaptive function. It’s telling us something about the world around us that we should attend to.”
(L-R) Amrita Tripathi – Vikram Patel – Neha Kirpal – Puneeta Roy
The problem, he said, isn’t feeling low or overwhelmed. The problem begins when those feelings persist even when you try to cope, and eventually begin to interfere with daily life — work, relationships, sleep, basic functioning.
“That’s when your internal radar should say: maybe I need some external help,” he says.
Crucially, Patel framed help-seeking not as failure but as escalation, the same way one would seek support for physical illness if home remedies didn’t work.
GOOGLE IS NOT THE ENEMY, PANIC IS
When moderator Puneeta Roy joked about “Doctor Google,” Patel didn’t dismiss the internet outright.
“I actually think the internet has been transformative,” he said. “It does provide information that can be helpful.”
The danger, he cautioned, lies in unfiltered, ideological, or sensational sources that amplify fear rather than understanding. His advice was practical and clear: stick to trusted, collective voices —such as professional organisations, credible platforms, and people with lived experience rather than loud individuals pushing extreme claims.
The real work, though, he argued, begins before panic sets in.
THREE WAYS TO COPE BEFORE YOU COLLAPSE
Drawing not just from science but from his own life, Patel outlined three simple, evidence-backed coping strategies that he returns to again and again.
First: calming the mind
Meditation, yoga, breathing — practices deeply rooted in Indian tradition but now repackaged as “mindfulness” in the West — remain among the most effective tools for regulating stress.
Second: challenging avoidance.
“If I’m withdrawing from something because it makes me anxious,” Patel said, “the right tactic is often to engage with it.” This is because avoidance may offer short-term relief, but over time it shrinks life.
Third: connecting socially.
Family, friends, faith, community — mental health, he reminded the audience, is never an individual project.
“Try one or more of these,” he said, “and nine times out of ten, what was troubling you feels much less troubling.”
TRAUMA LIVES IN THE BODY TOO
Neha Kirpal, co-founder of Amaha, brought the conversation firmly into lived experience, especially for those carrying unresolved childhood trauma.
“For many of us growing up,” she said, “coping meant running, freezing, or fighting. And those are survival mechanisms.”
But survival strategies, she warned, don’t age well.
“We cannot outrun these problems, and we cannot put them in the deep freezer and hope they’ll go away,” she said. Trauma, Kirpal explained, doesn’t stay in memory alone, but it lodges itself in the body.
“I have to bring my mind into my body,” she said. “What’s happening physically is also connected to what’s happening mentally.”
Her most resonant line landed softly but firmly: “Between being the person the world wants to see and the person you want to be, choose yourself.”
PUT THE PHONE DOWN (YES, REALLY)
Amrita Tripathi, founder of The Health Collective and author of The Age of Anxiety, spoke candidly about the contradictions of awareness.
“Despite everything I know,” she admitted, “I will still be on Instagram late at night when I’m stressed, and it will make me more stressed.”
Her advice was refreshingly unglamorous: put the phone away, even briefly, and especially at night.
During the pandemic, she recalled, one coping strategy stayed with her from an interview: do something for someone else.
“It can be as simple as calling your grandmother,” she said. “Or checking on a friend you’ve been thinking about.”
Loneliness, Tripathi warned, has become its own epidemic, amplified by social media that connects but isolates at the same time.
“We are each other’s community,” she said. “Sometimes just saying ‘I want to talk’ is enough.”
COMPASSION IS NOT SOFT, IT’S STRUCTURAL
As the conversation turned to kindness and empathy — words often reduced to buzzwords today — Patel returned to a core idea that underpins his life’s work.
“We are a social species,” he said. “We are not autonomous agents.”
Modern medicine, he argued, often treats mental health as an individual malfunction, ignoring the networks — families, neighbourhoods, digital worlds — that shape our minds.
A century from now, Patel predicted, historians will point to the arrival of the digital world as a profound inflection point in how humans organise relationships.
The challenge now, he suggested, is not nostalgia for joint families or older systems, but rebuilding trust, compassion, and connection in new forms — not as sentiment, but as infrastructure.
– Ends
Published On:
Jan 18, 2026
