Mental health is never prioritized as much as it should be. Especially in India, mental health and therapy are often stigmatized and are deemed unnecessary. Going through anxiety and depression lately, I was discussing therapy with my brother and came across YourDost on a website that listed India’s best online platforms for mental weel-being.
The Bengaluru based startup was initially started as a blog by Richa Singh and Puneet Manuja in 2012. Richa Singh was born and brought up in Bhopal and was always full of energy and optimism.
“I really enjoyed and pursued dancing, painting, swimming and table tennis. I was always considered a jovial person and had a lot of friends confiding in me” says Richa.
After finishing her schooling, Richa pursued a Bachelors degree in Design at IIT Guwahati. However, an incident there made an impact on Richa’s life and her approach to mental health. One of her hostel mates resorted to suicide after failing to cope up with the thought of not having a decent campus placement.
“When I started working, I noticed people around me were stressed due to job pressures and relationship issues. However again, most of these people were not willing to talk about their problems fearing social implications and for the fear of being called mentally ill. In this period, I discussed the idea with my co-Founder, Puneet Manuja, who had faced similar experiences. He had faced placement pressures even though he was a gold medallist in his batch of NIT, Trichy. We brainstormed together and created our first business idea and that’s how YourDOST began in the year 2014” recounts Richa.
The blog was started in 2012 and featured various interviews discussing mental health. Within no time, the blog became quite popular. But ultimately, to have an impact on the lives of a bigger set of people, the founders switched it to an online platform. The website YourDost was launched in 2014 with three key elements namely, self-help, peer-to-peer and one-to-one.
Self-help focuses on providing quality content that helps a person educate himself/herself about mental health. Peer-to-peer focuses on putting up stories of people going through mental health issues, for peers to read and understand that they are not alone in this. One-to-one involves speaking to experts to tackle mental health issues head on.
Richa recounts that initially, they used a lot of negative statements like “Are you stressed?”, “Are you going through a bad breakup?”, “Are you having marriage troubles?”, that used to scare off people instead of pushing to open up. But the team learnt from their mistakes and changed their approach which fetched better results.
YourDost brings free text-based counselling while charging a minimum of Rs 400 and Rs 600 for voice and video counseling respectively. The platform boasts of psychologists, counsellors, career coaches and relationship advisors to cater to different issues like coping up with heartbreak, depression, anxiety, poor career choices and much more.
The platform allows a person to create a personalized program if he cannot find a match in the existing ones. The online platform has 750-plus experts, conducts 1,200 sessions per day and has helped over 12 lakh people till now. The platform is also available as an app on Play Store.The start-up currently has a team of 25 people.
At the end of the day, the founders are immensely happy to impact lives around in a positive way. Richa especially recalls an incident where a boy texted her saying that Yourdost saved many lives and his was one among them. As for the future, they are looking forward to develop a revenue generating model soon!
Take the much needed step put an end to mental health stigma and install the app if you are going through a tough time, or if you happen to know someone who is in need of support or therapy please refer www.yourdost.com to them.
