The Shrinking Couch

The Shrinking Couch

The Shrinking Couch (TSC) is a website, working to build a network of individuals sharing personal experiences, resources and ideas pertaining to mental health. TSC aims to promote mental health, awareness of mental illness and advance proactive behavior towards seeking information about and availing mental health services.

Mission statement

TSC introduces everyone to the idea of mental health and mental health conditions as a normal part of life, by talking about it openly, meaningfully and constructively. Our aim is to build a community which accepts, understands and provides support for anyone with mental health concerns. TSC is a space for comfortable and open sharing which encourages mutual support, akin to the space provided by the stereotypical therapists’ couch, but with easier availability and a larger outreach.

We want everyone to see mental health conditions as experiences causing discomfort, but not as cases of weak will. We want to share the many ways of approaching a mental health condition as something that can be helped, overcome, fought, treated or cured, but most importantly, it must be something that is supported. TSC will bring together stories to connect the personal yet collective nature of mental health conditions, to make difficulties of this nature relateable and less intimidating, both individually and societally.

Overall, we stand to promote:

  • Awareness about mental health conditions and other psychologically distressing experiences
  • Knowledge about mental health, by sharing proactive measures that will help people take charge of their own mental health

We want to address not just diagnostic categories of mental health conditions, but also experiential categories of life that can cause equal, though sometimes undiagnosable pain. Through sharing personal stories, highlighting professional work in the area and disseminating relevant information, TSC aims to reduce the stigma and treatment gap, and by doing so, build an active, informed and non-hierarchical mental health community in India.

Summary of relevant work

Some of our articles that have had a meaningful impact are:

There are many others, targeting specific experiential and diagnostic conditions, all written with first-hand experience. We hope people find support and answers when reading them.

Key partners

Details

Approach(es)
Empowerment and service user involvement
Human rights
Prevention and promotion
Training, education and capacity building
Disorder(s)
All mental health conditions
Region(s)
Asia
Population(s)
Adults
Children and adolescents
Communicable diseases (e.g. HIV/AIDS, TB)
Disability
Families and carers
Humanitarian and conflict health
Maternal and neonatal health
Minority populations
Non-communicable diseases (e.g. cancer, diabetes, stroke)
Older adults
Setting(s)
Community
Country(s)
India