Column: Mental Wellbeing #2 - Girls for Girls Club Seminar

This week, we’d like to talk about steps being taken within our TISB community to support mental health. There exists a plethora of resources for members of our community to ensure they can cope with whatever problems they may be facing, academic or personal. The focus of today’s article is the Girls for Girls club. This wonderful initiative was started in August 2021 by grade 11 student Camelia, to bring awareness to mental health and remove the stigma around it. 

Just this Thursday (the 10th of February), the Girls for Girls club held an open online session on Mental Health and Stress Management where they invited Dr. Prasanna and Ms. Raina to speak on these topics. The session revolved around how to effectively manage stress and cope with certain difficult situations, including information regarding what anxiety and depression are, as well as how they affect us. The presenters offered a step-by-step solution to handle instances where we might feel overwhelmed and wrapped up the session by covering any questions that attendees had. 

We also had the opportunity to converse with Camelia, the student who founded this club, and get her views on mental health in India, as well as find out what inspired her to start this club and how she hopes to move forward with it. Here's the highlights. 

Question: What is your aim behind the Girls for Girls club? 
Camelia: There are three aspects to Girls for Girls – mental health, raising awareness about sexual abuse and helping girl minors get their basic needs and rights. I want to let people know that it's ok to be suffering from mental health issues and help destigmatize this topic so that people can more easily seek out the help that they need. 

Q: What led you to starting the Girls for Girls club? 
Camelia: I’ve suffered from an autoimmune disease called urticaria, which for the past year, I’ve had to take steroids to treat, and this included side effects which messed with the chemicals in my brain, making me feel anxious or depressed. Knowing what it’s like, I want to help other people be okay with mental health and issues and let them know that it’s okay to acknowledge these issues and seek help for them. 

Q: What do you have planned for the future? 
Camelia: in the short term, we’re trying to set up a session where we want to explore the links between music and mental health, so we’re trying to bring in a professional to possibly talk about it. In the long term, our goal is to broaden our audience beyond TISB students and bring our sessions to kids in orphanages as well. 

We hope you enjoyed the session this Thursday, and encourage you to join any future sessions. As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us; we’d be happy to share our perspective or simply listen. 

Stay safe, and have a lovely weekend! 
Yash and Anvita, PR Prefects, Grade 12