This article has been published in partnership with  India Mental Health Alliance (IMHA).This article discusses suicide, mental health conditions, and bereavement by suicide. Reader discretion is advised.

A 16-year-old stands in front of a mirror with her mother, holding up one photograph after another and repeating the same words: “this is you”. Her mother, in the middle of an episode of psychosis associated with schizophrenia, looks at the picture, then at her own reflection, and insists that the woman standing beside her husband is a stranger and not her.

In Madurai, a woman grieving her husband sits through a crying spell while the family's golden retriever climbs onto her lap, wraps both paws around her neck and licks away her tears. 

In Mumbai, a 46-year-old woman lives on her own. OCD and anxiety have shaped her life for as long as she can remember, and she still needs a great deal of support and care to live her life. Hanging over it all is one question: what happens to her when her parents are gone? Her mother's answer, repeated over the years, is the same: “you will be cared for."

These three moments belong to Dr Kavita Arora, a child psychiatrist, Founding Cohort IMHAand co-founder Children First, Dr Nandini Murali, founder of SPEAK and Project SPEAK, and Dr Pheroza J. Godrej, a philanthropist, and art historian who founded the Cymroza Art Gallery.

Each stood in a different place around a family's mental health journey, as a daughter, a wife and a mother, and each has now told her story in Homecoming: Mental health journeys of resilience, healing and wholeness; India's first anthology of 11 women leaders navigating mental health challenges.

Their stories mostly play out away from the doctor’s cabin. As Kavita puts it, "a lot of the living actually happens between doctors’ appointments." In these three homes, it was the women who held that daily living together, and very few people asked how they were doing. This story keeps returning to that question, and to another: who was looking out for them?

What a child learns to recognise

When a patient walks into Kavita's consulting room today, she does something her training never taught her. She asks about everyone who has not come in. "I don't see just the person or their illness," she says. "I actually try to ask about the family members who are not in the room."

The habit has its roots in a childhood she did not think of as unusual back then. Her father was the neighbourhood doctor and the family's only earner, her mother did most of the cooking, and her brother, a year and a half older, was her closest ally. Her mother lived with schizophrenia, although nobody around Kavita named or explained the term.

"When her episodes would occur, she recalls, “There could be violence,shouting, and paranoia, but as a child, I didn't know what it was. I thought this was how families were, and this is what happens inside the closed doors of other families," she recalls.

While her father went about his duties, as children she and her brother learnt to read the atmosphere in the house acutely. At the same time they formed a survival bond, caring for and supporting each other. “March and the end of the financial year was often associated with my mother’s relapse, adding to the exam stressors for us as children," shares Kavita.  

Neighbours often heard the fights, yet "there is no space or forum in which this can be........

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