By 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.
Somewhere along the way, however, emotional wellbeing became disconnected from the structure of modern life.
Today, people are expected to simply “deal with things” as they come. Emotional struggles are often normalised until they begin affecting performance, relationships, health, or daily functioning in visible ways. By then, many individuals are already deeply exhausted internally.
And maybe that is where emotional education becomes important. Not as therapy, but as a foundational life skill.
It is the ability to recognise emotions without immediately suppressing them. It is understanding how stress affects the mind and body. It is learning how to communicate honestly, regulate reactions, build healthier patterns, and develop self-awareness before unhealthy coping mechanisms quietly become permanent ways of living.
These are not luxury skills. They shape relationships, workplaces, families, communities, and the way people experience themselves.
Helplines and crisis support remain deeply important, but they cannot become the entire foundation of emotional wellbeing. A society cannot depend only on emergency responses while neglecting emotional development altogether.
I think India now needs to gradually shift from only post-disaster support towards corrective and preventive emotional education as well. Because emotional wellbeing should not become relevant only after someone has already reached their breaking point.
Sometimes the most important conversations are the ones that happen much earlier, before the crisis, before the collapse, before people lose connection with themselves entirely.