Living through a pandemic is not easy on the human mind. Another dangerous crisis is brewing in our individual heads and reaching out for help may seem like asking for too much when a threat of such proportions is looming in the background. The Yellow Club wants you to know that nothing can diminish your mental health and that you will be heard. The social media platform and app is organising two weeks of free counselling for anyone who needs it. “In the past year, mental health has received more importance than it ever has before,” says Co-founder Rahul Roy who set the platform up with Subin Shaji and Rashmi Nair. “People have been speaking about it openly and even governments are engaging. That’s a long way to come from considering the way we usually approach mental heal as a culture.”
Rahul, who originally hails from Kottayam, set up the platform when he was a student of BA Physics at St Stephen’s College, Delhi. After attending a workshop on mental health, his eyes were opened to how important it was. Curious to know why so many people kept their emotions locked up, he set up Humans of Kerala on Instagram and Facebook in 2019. Through the platform, he would organise workshops and seminars on the stigmatisation of mental health across cities in Kerala. The 24-year-old says, “When I started doing this, I encountered a lot of people, especially the youth who talked about how they are not able to openly speak about mental health. We started sharing these stories which were predominantly from Kerala and we shared them on social media where more people would be encouraged to open up.” The Yellow Club was set up thanks to one such workshop in Kakkanad.
On World Mental Health, they set up workshops in Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Kozhikode, Bengaluru and Chennai. Their mission statement steered towards the most important demand from the communities: making mental health accessible and affordable. Using this as his motivation, Rahul quit all other commitments and decided to support the cause full-time. They went on to set up an app that connects mental health experts with people who need support. With over 50 practitioners registered on the platform, it is still open to any expert who wants to lend a helping hand. Launched in December 2020, it has over 150 users on Android and iOS. Their main areas of focus have been rural areas in southern states where mental health has still not become a topic of concern.
