Calm India, a web-series launched to address the declining mental risk in India

December 2017, Bangalore: Calm India, a health tech start-up launched an initiative to spread awareness about depression and declining mental risk in India. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) course, has been launched to gain control of mind and build resilience to stress, anxiety and depression. The course will be conducted through a web series comprising of fourteen episodes of curated therapeutic content of approximately 15 minutes each. It’s a 4 week online self-help course on Building Mental Resilience Tailored for everyone across the country.

Calm India’s 4-week course is a complete package which includes 13 episodes narrated by a young psychologist and a volunteer at Teach for India, Faraz Khan. He teaches the art of acceptance, the evolutionary and the biological basis for emotions, the actual science behind meditation, deep breathing, exposure therapy, flooding, thought spirals, tackling skewed thinking patterns, retraining your sleeping habits, the value of different components of your diet, the medications that are often prescribed including their side effects, an interactive assessment of where you lie on the spectrum of anxiety, depression and insomnia; etc. The course is being conducted online to reach out to as many people as possible in the country.

In addition, this extensive solution includes a set of 23 compact audio books that help in building healthy thought patterns. The soothing voice of Gaana Srinivas guides you into the course in audio form and also helps unwind the after effects of a stressful day with audio cognitive behavioural therapy. It also includes a Reference deck which is a beautiful graphical representation of the course content in a concise format. The objective of Calm India is to provide self-help online access to mental health solution that is very affordable to all. The entire course costs INR 399 only.

On announcing the launch Shashank Udupa, Founder of Calm India says “In India, 93% of the population suffers from chronic stress and well over 1/4 th of the country suffers from depression. As a business, if we were hiring therapists (or aggregating them), we’d still run into the issue of the imbalance between number of therapists versus number of mental health sufferers, so we’ve come up with a more scalable solution at a price that makes it really affordable for all the people in remote areas of India that neither have access nor have the purchasing power to spend on a therapist. Our next step is to regionalize the content and have it dubbed into most of the popular Indian Language.”

Shashank further focuses on the awareness of mental health issues that is almost negligible in India. He says, “A general session of a therapist costs a good amount of money and it takes a minimum of 15 sessions to have an effect. Not all teenagers or working professionals going through anxiety or depression can possibly afford the money or the time to go to a therapist regularly. Housewives undergoing similar issues also may not be as comfortable due to our society’s outlook. They can easily buy our calm India course and regain their mental health without having to heading out for help and it’s also easy on their pocket. This platform being priced at 399 rupees makes it affordable and private to seek out better thinking patterns. We want to give the masses a better alternative solution that uses real science. We also have the links to our research on our website for every point we’ve presented, if the viewer wants to dig deeper at any point during or prior to the course.”

Enrolling for this course is quick and seamless – visit www.calmindia.com, register yourself and you’re good to go!

About Calm India

Calm India is a bootstrapped company funded entirely by the founders of Avalon Labs, run by ex-Jobspire CEO, Varun Mayya and ex-investment (IIFL) banker, Shashank Udupa. The main objective is to provide self-help online access to mental health solution and also make it affordable at the same time.

Calm India was brought into existence after realizing that there is only 1 therapist for every 4 lakh people going through mental health issues in India. It is our aim to provide very affordable cognitive behavioural therapy to everyone in the country.

The Idea of Calm India came about when Varun needed to manage the constant stress and ambiguity of running a start-up. Motivated to teach himself and his team how to manage the workplace stress effectively, he stumbled upon Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, an effective method to retrain thought pattern to deal with stress and built a comprehensive and affordable solution for offering CBT online.

————-Pavit Nanda