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Mental Health Journeys of Resilience, Healing and Wholeness
Speakers
Conversations around mental health often remain confined to whispers, held back by silence, stigma, and fear. Yet when lived experiences are shared, they open windows into understanding, empathy, and change. This session reflects on how personal storytelling can transform pain into purpose, inviting us to see resilience and healing in new, deeply human ways.
The session will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Presented by:
Speakers
Nandini Murali
Dr Nandini Murali is a gender-responsive, lived experience and trauma-informed changemaker in mental health, committed to dismantling stigma and reimagining suicide prevention and postvention.
Following the suicide of her husband, a respected urologist, Nandini experienced a profound personal awakening that reshaped her life’s purpose. She transformed her grief into advocacy by founding SPEAK, an initiative of the MS Chellamuthu Trust and Research Foundation, Madurai, which nurtures safe, stigma-free conversations on suicide. She also launched SPEAK2US (93754 93754), a culturally sensitive mental health helpline, and Project SPEAK, a pioneering rural postvention model that has supported over 600 women bereaved by suicide.
A certified life coach specialising in loss and transition, Nandini has over two decades of experience across mental health, gender and organisational culture. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies and a postgraduate diploma in Gender and Development from the Royal Tropical Institute (Netherlands) and the UN Women Training Centre.
Kavita Arora
Dr Kavita Arora is a child and adolescent psychiatrist with over twenty-five years of practice experience and is a co-founder of Children First. She has grown up with a parent who had mental illness and multiple medical disorders for whom she eventually became a carer. She is also part of the founding cohort of the IMHA. Committed to early intervention and inclusive mental healthcare, she has helped shape a multidisciplinary, indigenous model for neurodivergent children and families with diverse developmental needs.
Sidrah Naiyer
Sidrah Naiyer is a quiet witness to the ways systems fail—and how people still survive them. Born and raised in Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh, she has lived with depression for over a decade, learning to navigate silence as both a shield and weight. Her work, which spans rural classrooms, mental health circles and government rooms, is always asking the question: what does dignity look like here? Sidrah believes that vulnerability is a form of leadership, and that the smallest truths, when spoken aloud, can move mountains. She works and hopes in the spaces where pain meets policy and where care begins.
Pheroza J Godrej
Dr Pheroza J. Godrej is an art historian and holds a PhD in ancient Indian culture. She founded the Cymroza Art Gallery and authored various publications and curated highly acclaimed exhibitions for leading national and international museums. She is chairperson of the Museum Society of Mumbai. She is trustee of the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Impact India Foundation and the Sea Cadet Corp India, and also serves as a director of the Asia Society India Centre. Dr. Godrej is on the board of the Oxford India Centre for the Sustainable Development International Advisory Council. She is an ardent promoter of the Cornelia Sorabji Programme, and supports the Cornelia Sorabji Scholarship at Somerville College, Oxford.
Aparna Piramal Raje
Aparna Piramal Raje is an award-winning writer, speaker, facilitator and educator. Her bestselling book, Chemical Khichdi (Penguin, 2022), blends memoir and self-help to share her twenty-year journey with bipolar disorder. It was shortlisted for the AutHer Awards and acclaimed for its authenticity. Aparna’s ‘Head Office’ column in Mint profiled over 100 CEOs and inspired her first book, Working Out of the Box (Random House, 2015). She has written for the Financial Times and is a popular keynote speaker and LEGO Serious Play facilitator. A former CEO, she studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and earned her MBA from Harvard Business School.
Poornima Vishwanathan
Dr Poornima Viswanathan is an Assistant Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist with a PhD from NIMHANS. An autistic adult with lived experience of bipolar disorder and complex PTSD, her personal journey profoundly informs her teaching, therapeutic practice, and advocacy. Trained in trauma-focused and body-based psychotherapy, she works through a person-centred and compassionate lens. She co-founded the Centre for Neurodiversity Studies and Aagahii, the Centre for Psychotherapy Research and Training, and actively facilitates reflective spaces for students and practitioners. As a steering council member at IMHA, she integrates lived experience with clinical expertise to advance empathetic, evidence-based mental health care. Her work spans education, research, psychotherapy, and advocacy, with a commitment to strengthening mental health systems through empathy, inclusion, and professional integrity.
Neha Kripal
A creative and social entrepreneur, Neha Kirpal founded the India Art Fair (2008–2018) and then moved her focus fully to mental healthcare. This was inspired by her own lived experiences as a child and carer to a parent with schizophrenia and as a survivor of sibling suicide loss. As Amaha’s co-founder since 2019, Neha helped build what is today India’s largest private sector mental health service. With an in-house team of 200+ therapists and psychiatrists, Amaha provides care across 600 cities online and across eight centres in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, and recently opened its first speciality mental health hospital. In 2021, to serve families across the lifespan, Amaha came together with Children First—a specialist child and youth mental health organisation that has been working with families, schools and communities for nearly two decades. Neha is a founding cohort member of the India Mental Health Alliance (IMHA), set up in 2023 to build capacities for mental health professionals and care systems with a national cross-sectoral alliance of over 220 member organisations to establish mental health as a developmental agenda in India.
An Aspen Fellow and Eisenhower Fellow, Neha has been part of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders community. She received NDTV’s Indian of the Year Award, Business Today’s India’s Most Powerful Women in Business Award and is a recipient of the Nari Shakti Award, presented by the President of India.
