The best time to read Shelja Sen’s Reclaim Your Life: Going Beyond Silence, Shame and Stigma in Mental Health, is now. It’s been a long winter in Delhi, and with the sun playing peekaboo, cold winds blowing, and pollution levels soaring, it’s been difficult to go out and smell the roses. It’s easier still to sit at home, get under a quilt, binge on food and movies, and disconnect from the world. When is the point you realise this is not ‘normal’, this is something else? Shelja tells us, through her own experience with depression. But there is always hope when the sun comes out.

Her own daffodil moment (“I was not going to let this darkness knock me down to the ground.”) tells everyone that recovery is possible, that the human spirit is wired to grow. The book is peppered with what she calls lightposts that are often metaphors, but also simple phrases that reach down inside of us and dig out exactly what we’re feeling. Sample this: “We get caught in the vicious cycle of suffering, as we let this pain define us — ‘I am depressed’, ‘I am an anxious person’, ‘I am a loser’. It robs us of our sense of dignity and agency and makes us feel helpless, hopeless and worthless.”

It’s not a book about woe though; there’s a bit of humour (she talks about dementors) and lots of science dejargonised so you don’t even know it’s science (the lizard brain wired to look out for danger, for instance). There are many examples to learn from. More than anything, it has practical exercises (such as how to externalise stress rather than internalise it) that help us in the day-to-day.

As a child psychologist who works in Delhi, and having co-founded Children First, Shelja gives us a brief insight into mental health itself.

How did the book begin?

2017 was when WHO started with the campaign Let’s Talk. I had started working on the book in 2016, so my second book (Imagine: No Child Left Invisible) was not out by the time I’d started working on my third, because the second one needed a lot of research. This came from my heart. I’ve been working in this area for 40 years, I didn’t need to research so much; it’s about what I believe in as a therapist, as a human being who has been through depression.

Has your organisation done any outreach work in the mental health space?

There’s this campaign we’ve been doing, the Let’s Talk in colleges. It started with five colleges in Delhi University. We connect with the Psychology department, but it’s open for all students. The first time we went to a college, we had a discussion with the faculty, but they were not very sure how many people would turn up. When we entered the first college, there were 200-300 people, and it was jam-packed. That was a wake-up call that people are ready to talk. We are seeing it in our centre: how young people are struggling with depression, OCD, eating disorders. In each college, we trained five peer mentors over six days. They went back to their colleges and they founded mental-health societies. And then there is supervision.

Mental health issues are almost an epidemic. Do you think the numbers have grown?

I think it’s genuinely grown, though it’s difficult to pinpoint why it’s happening. When we were in college there was that existential angst about ‘What is the meaning of life?’ But now there’s more of that: the sense of despair we see in young people — ‘What’s the point of it all? Why do you live or I live? Why do we do what we do?’

Why is that?

There’s a sense of disconnect from others: not being able to be who you are, a lack of belonging. That’s one factor. Then there’s another factor: there’s a sense of directionless-ness or confusion. A lot of young people feel the choices are so many. Of course, social media plays its part in terms of young people who are making it. I have this young girl who told me: ‘I’m 21. By now I should have worked it out, written my book, got to know what I want to do with my life.’ I was thinking, at 21 I was clueless; I had no idea what I wanted to do in life, and that was okay. There’s this sense of, ‘You’ve got to achieve.’ There are a lot of paradoxical things happening: you can do whatever you want to, but look at young people who are excelling, who have thousands and thousands of followers on Instagram. There’s a sense of confusion in parents and children. All this leads to a sense of disconnection in young people.

You speak a lot about building emotionally-safe spaces. How does this feed into mental health?

The core, the crucial element, the foundation of our work is about building emotionally safe spaces: in homes, schools, communities, where children feel safe. So a child feels: I’m worthy, no matter what my abilities, background, religion; original, I’m unique, I’m not like others, but that’s okay; welcome, I belong — it’s an acronym I call WOW.