Apurva from Yuva Parivartan talks about the impact the Outlive workshops have had on the young people we organised these workshops with youth in Mumbai between October 2022-January 2023.
English translation: Hello my name is Apoorva. I work at Yuva Parivartan as a counsellor. Yuva Parivartan offers skill development courses to students who have not completed their studies or have dropped out from school. We run skill development sessions and courses for such youth all over Maharashtra and in Bangalore. These sessions are on nursing, basic computer skills, Tally and others, along with offering placements so that the students can stand on their own feet. I think it is important to make young people aware about such sensitive topics right from the start because of multiple reasons such as dropping out of school, not being able to complete college, family dysfunction, stresses from the pandemic and multiple others, so that young people don't take any wrong steps when facing such issues. With Outlive, we have conducted sessions on awareness for sensitive topics like suicide across all our centres in Mumbai. We can see that post these sessions, students are becoming aware and they are coming forward to ask questions and discuss these issues with us. After some of the sessions, students have come forward to say that, yes, I have also had suicidal thoughts or I am currently having suicidal thoughts and are seeking counselling. In such situations we can facilitate tie-ups to existing resources that students can use and that can help students from taking their lives. I feel that it is important to be able to give correct information and resources on such sensitive topics to prevent suicide. We already offer individual sessions but with support from Outlive, we have been able to give correct and factual information about suicide prevention to large groups of students in shorter time. I'll talk about one particular case which came forward after Outlive sessions; this is a student who is in one of our Mumbai centres. This student is 23 years old, and in her past life she had attempted suicide. She is now out of those feelings but after the sessions, she realised that it is important to talk about these things and she came forward with this information to say that something wrong happened to her. Now she has complete information on how to talk about suicidal feelings, whom to reach out to, how to talk about this with others. We also got to know about a number of helplines in India through Outlive sessions and we are now distributing these to all are students so that if at any point students need counselling or support for suicidal feelings, they know whom to reach out to and they can connect with the helplines directly or they can come to us. After the 23 year old student came to us, we continued with her individual sessions. She is also wanting to create awareness about these issues among her peers as she is now herself aware and wants to share this with others.