Talking About Mental Health with Children in Krishnapudur

April 2, 2023

By Reet Kaur Goraya, Oberlin Shansi Fellow, Community Wellbeing

On April 2, 2023, members of Keystone’s Community Wellbeing team organised a meetup in Krishnapudur to encourage conversations on mental health among young children. A group of 21 students came together to play games that helped them find ways to discuss what they know about mental health and sanitation, and to talk about resources or methods they use to deal with their mental health.

We prepared activities to guide the plan for the day. These activities engaged the students in arts and crafts to make it easier to apply and learn about what mental health is. The kids were instructed to break up into groups and draw together. Each group was assigned an emotion, and asked to draw images they related to that emotion. The students also learned about mental health vocabulary, such as what mental health care is or what anxiety is, to help build knowledge on the subject. Vidya, part of the climate change program at Keystone, helped lead the children through these activities along with two educators, Manimegalai and Ponnamma, who work in and around Krishnapudur. They helped organise the children, and lead discussions pertaining to mental health.

Children drawing what they perceive the emotions sad and angry to be.

This meeting was organised as the Community Wellbeing team aims to gain an understanding as to how much students currently know about mental health. Moving forwards, the team hopes to work with the students from Krishnapudur who are within the ages of 13-17 in order to understand more about how children within this age range perceive their own mental health, and what resources they lack/use to help their mental health. The team also hopes to gain an understanding into how access or lack thereof to sanitary resources like toilets or menstrual products affects mental health, if at all. This will hopefully help create initiatives in the future to address mental health and sanitation issues around the Nilgiris, particularly amongst students.