My Personal Experiences With Mental Health Issues: Brain Bristle Founder Devangana Mishra

What is it like to live with a mental condition? Let’s hear from a mental health advocate Brain Bristle Founder Devangana.

Mental health is integral to our well-being. But the number of people who are struggling with mental health conditions is increasing worldwide. COVID-induced lockdown and seclusion, social media influence, substance abuse, work pressure, financial problems, disconnection from nature; these are some factors that are likely contributing to increasing mental health problems. Like any other medical illness, mental illness needs attention. Left untreated, it can have serious consequences, including death. Unfortunately, many patients in India are suffering silently, due to the prevailing stigma surrounding mental health and lack of access to mental health services.

What is it like to live with a mental condition? In an exclusive conversation with The HealthSite, Devangana Mishra, Founder and CEO of Brain Bristle, shares her personal experiences with mental health issues and how it led her to become a mental health advocate and entrepreneur.

Devangana has been making a positive impact in the field of mental health in India. Brain Bristle is an initiative launched to work with autistic children individually at a deeper level to bring out their best of abilities.

Let’s hear from Devangana about her struggle with anxiety, the challenges she faced, and how she won the battle.

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Having a strong support system is important

I value my mental health deeply, knowing where to spend it and where to waste it has helped through life. There’s a lot of noise in the world, just knowing how to sift out can be beneficial to begin with. I am terribly shy in public, but as a teacher, writer, poet, thinker, the CEO of my very interesting think tank, I have to emerge publicly, this emergence always causes a deep sense of vulnerability for me, not stemming from shame, but from the mere idea of being seen. I spend 70 per cent of my day as a teacher for young children and adolescents, so to suddenly be seen in an alternate light can make me want to hide like I did when I was very young, it’s ridiculous, I know, but also keeps life a little interesting and the adrenaline rush of emergence then is always exciting. To manage these combatant feelings, it helps that I have a support system, my family, my friends, the men in my life, to fall back on when I need.

My rendezvous with anxiety

After a few pangs of anxiety, breaking into a fever, hives and sicknesses, when I had to do brave professional and personal things, and recovering from them rather quickly and easily, I decided to publish my first book of prose and poetry in 2020, and make it in Bombay as a writer, that broke me down completely. To emerge as a distinguished, published poet with a book to my name, amidst the big names in the field, made me deeply vulnerable, anxious of the world, everything triggered me, sounds, sights, smells, systems, it was deeply horrifying- but, then, as always, this time it took me a little longer, but I made it out, the darkness of the time slowly faded away, that feeling of crippling fear passed, and I emerged braver, stronger, ready to take bigger and of course more worthwhile risks.