HYDERABAD: Pause for Perspective, a group of clinical psychologists, counsellors and educationists, have been helping individuals and groups for the past 8 years to overcome trauma, anxieties and life’s challenges. They focus on building communities and offer space that helps people to unfold human experience in an uninhibited manner, and build strength and capacity to deal with life’s difficulties. Here is an excerpt from the conversation we had with Aarathi Selvan and Nida Mir:
What is Pause for Perspective?
Aarathi: I started Pause as a private practice. At first, it was just me and then in 2015, I started to take on more people and now we are a team of close to 20 mental health practitioners. We see people across age bands, and identity locations, but specifically Pause is a social justice-based mental health organization. Over the years, we have learned and trained ourselves to become more aware of intersectional social justice, which is about centring all identity locations and how those influence the way we think about life and the issue at hand; what our resources are and can possibly be, to meet the challenges of our life. We are anti-oppressive, anti-caste, queer affirmative and neurodivergent affirmative space. The hope is to expand into a disability justice-based space as well.
Dealing with a diverse group of people, how do you ensure everybody gets the help they need?
Aarathi: Not just groups but each of us, within our marginalisations brings a specific expression of our distress as well as what works for us. A lot of invisibilisation happens in people’s experiences as the world we live in is a normative one. Existence itself, in juxtaposition with normativity, seems to be outside the norm. So even if you talk about bringing children to the workplace or one’s way of dressing, any presentation outside the normative domain seems to be ‘not okay’ and ‘pathological’. It’s a struggle, in terms of caste marginalization too. A lot of people come in and speak about how there is a lot of hiding that has to happen to work within “ideas of meritocracy”.
How do you make therapy more accessible for marginalised communities?
Aarathi: It’s a very challenging thing for us as we have to grapple with the question of how we sustain ourselves as an organisation. One of the things that I do is as a mental health practitioner and a teacher supervisor, to support my team in a manner that they can provide free mental health. So in the last two years, we’ve been able to do short-term therapy for about 400 people across the country and outside also. We also have a really strong fellowship program that works with children in the margins at the moment. And we hope to also work within larger community spaces. We believe that we need to create our communities of support. I run several groups which are very low cost, like 100-200 rupees. We have neurodivergent support groups, queer support groups, and a support group for people diagnosed with bipolar borderline. We also have movie nights and open mics cushioned by centring mental health. We also have a wonderful library where people can come and read. We hope to unpack the idea of what ‘therapy’ is and what else can be ‘therapeutic’ also.
What is neurodivergence?
Neurodiversity is like biodiversity, right? Each plant is an important part of the ecological diversity. It’s the same with human brains as well, that it’s part of the diversity of being human and that there is no one right and normal way of thinking about how our brains function. That’s, very broadly, what neurodiversity is. Neuro divergence is about centring neuro minorities. The world we live in focuses on a certain typicality and we centre around what is not typical but is a natural part of human diversity. So in our work, we try to explore in what ways, people are processing their emotions and their interpersonal relationships and their ability to function.
What ‘know-hows’ can people use when ‘un-aliving’ is on their minds?
Nida: It is an initiative that helps to build a community that makes mental health more accessible and not just within therapy but beyond. What to do when therapy is not accessible and people are in the middle of a situation which makes them feel vulnerable?
The initiative is to have conversations around their lived experience of being marginalised and in distress and particularly engaging with the thoughts of un-aliving.
We’ve used the word ‘un-aliving’ because suicide indicates that the person is responsible for whatever is happening in their life that is causing distress. But the idea of analyzing takes the pressure away and puts the accountability on the various factors that cause these thoughts for the person. This initiative is to bring out all the ‘Know-Hows’ that the person already has in creating safety, a support system for themselves that’ll help them outside of the therapy space. We wanted something visual that they can carry with them when they are in a distressed situation, like a safety toolbox or something like that. This small pocketbook becomes that toolbox that they can use even outside therapy or when they’re not able to access any other resources that will help them.
What are the identifiers that students should use if they find themselves in a dark space?
Nida: First, we recognize what is not working for the person. What is it about their environment or their situation or the system that they’re living in that is not working for them? That’s what we try to sort of unpack and figure out ways to then, how do we navigate through this situation. We talk about what are the possibilities and for students under stress, opening up spaces to talk about their anxieties has proved to be helpful for them. We do need to question what education systems are doing students are so vulnerable and prone to suicide.