The beginning
Understanding self care was Tangent’s first community mental health project. One of the tenets of Tangent is accessibility and this project was in alignment with that as well as opportunity to do promotive mental health care work on the field.
Following our previous project “Zooming In Zooming Out” series, we met with Shravan Raghav (from The Safe Place) for exploring a possible collaboration. The Safe Place was working with a group of young adults as part of a community project in Kasimedu (Chennai). The focus of our work with them was on understanding mental health care, mapping socio-cultural context and building systems for collective care within the community.
While the country was in various stages of lockdown and unlock, our ideation process remained fluid for a very long time and kept shifting based on physical safety, bandwidth and the lockdown rules.
Deepika brainstorming with team Tangent and Shravan to build a community mental health plan for capacity building with the young people in Kasimedu.
The safe place was working with the community on mental health literacy and awareness. Tangent’s role in the project was to explain the importance and nuance of mental health and wellbeing as well as curate tools of care for them as individuals as well as a community.
Meet the collaborators
Our conversations, enthusiasm and our work was supported by Shravan and others working with The Safe Place. 😀 You can find out more about their work and reach out to them for a conversation (we highly recommend it, their enthusiasm is extremely infectious) through their socials!
Our process
Our work began with a short needs assessment to understand the ongoing project as well as to map out our role as mental health workers. Through multiple conversations, connecting various aspects of self in relation to the environment formed the crux of our work. The nature of our work emerged as promoting mental health care and support and hence moved away from interventions and diagnostic labels.
Our first meeting with the participants focussed on understanding the word ‘mental health’ and understanding this in Tamil. It meant calling out
This opened up more avenues to work with the young people in the community and we met them once again to explore building a community situated in practices of collective care. Our conversations began with understanding the ‘self’ in self care and moved to what caring for others can look like.
Both of these workshops, despite being online in the peak of zoom fatigue, created spaces that were safe, fun, warm and filled with ideas, curiosity and care.
Reflections
The last steps
We ended our collaboration with collating some responses from the groups on our socials. You can take a look here!
We also created a workbook for the community in Tamil and English to keep engaging with and checking with their mental health.
Welcome to TangentMHI! 