Women’s Day: This 24-year-old woman works for a mentally healthy community

Swetha Desiraju of Bright Side Foundation, works towards shifting the perspective from mental health stigma to mental health support

Hyderabad: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, says 24-year-old Swetha Desiraju, who has founded Bright Side Foundation, the city-based non-profit organisation which strives to shift the perspective from mental health stigma to mental health support.

Growing up in a house full of medical journals and stigma-breaking conversations, the essence of mental health and the change it deserves came early to Swetha, who pursued a course to be a psychologist. It was during her Bachelor’s in Psychology that she started working towards the prevention of mental illnesses.

“While I was interning at many hospitals in Hyderabad, I realised that we should be doing something about the prevention of mental illnesses and developing more protective factors in growing years,” she says.

Bright Side Foundation seeks to bring community service and mental health together. “We’re a strong team of 50 like-minded individuals coming together to help build mentally healthy communities in India,” Swetha adds.

The organisation has successfully led many projects, including ‘Wind Beneath The Wings’, ‘UMEED’ and ‘ASAP’, which work towards making mental health more accessible, equipping adolescents with social and emotional learning skills and competencies, promoting well-being, and spreading awareness about suicide
prevention.

“The internet has helped raise a lot of consciousness about the conversation surrounding mental health in recent years. Hope more people from the city come up so that we can soon have mentally healthy Telangana,” concludes Swetha Desiraju.