Vikram Beri

I've had these questions as long as I can remember.

Who Am I?
What Is The Purpose Of Life?
What Is Death?
What Is God?
Why Does Happiness Fade?

Life moved on, but these stayed, unanswered.

I am a father, a founder, and someone who has lived through mental illness. The mental illness is what led me to a jail cell.

A hair transplant gone wrong gave me a punctured crown, followed by 5 weeks of barely any sleep and prescription opioids, which led to a mind that began to outrun me. I felt like a storm. Little did I know then that I had lost touch with reality.

Mental health has met me from nearly every side: as a caregiver, as the founder who built a place for others to find support sooner than they otherwise might, and finally as the patient, carried through wild, swinging manic episodes. Each side taught me something the others could not.

It was the Bhagavad Gita that found me when I was most lost, handed to me by a priest in that cell.

What it pointed to turned out to be quite a paradox. We are not our thoughts, ego, roles, or story. We are the awareness in which all of these appear, like a scene appearing on a screen, waves in water, clouds in the sky. The mind is Nature’s instrument for us to express ourselves and experience the world, and it is clean like a child’s at first, then conditioned into identity, fear, and division through the process of growing up. As we grow, we start to believe we are what happened to us, and forget that we are always as blissful as a baby, except that we stop recognizing it.

However, imprisonment is not only physical. The invisible cage of thoughts and beliefs, the ones that show us a gloomy tomorrow or make us doubt our courage after a failure, is far harder to recognize. Most of us never see beyond the bars.

I don't share any of this to make light of what happened, or to tidy a hard year into a neat lesson. My illness, and the actions it drove, caused real fear and pain, to the people I love who were only trying to help, and to others who were caught in a frightening situation, through no fault of their own. I carry that, and I always will. If there is anything worth passing on from all this, I offer it in that spirit, not as someone who has it figured out, but as someone still learning, and still sorry for the hurt along the way.

It is with this hope that I share my journey, that it might help someone navigate their own.

In the stillness of mind, the truth reveals itself.

I don't even know when it began, but I could no longer ignore it when, in 2013, I had a conversation with my wife, a psychologist, while dropping her at an internship tucked into an inconvenient corner of the city. I asked why anyone would practice somewhere so hard to reach. Because it's stigmatized, she said. People don't want to be seen walking into a therapist's office. I remember thinking how unfortunate that is: to be suffering, and to not seek help, because you'd be judged for suffering. That judgement is what makes mental health the loneliest ailment there is. The hiding was the whole problem. So I asked: why not build something anonymous and easy, where nobody sees nobody?

The idea never left. It kept pulling me back into my own younger years, and into questions I couldn't stop asking. Would I have turned out any different if I'd had someone to talk to through the not-so-great memories? Would it have eased the peer pressure, or the pain of not making it to IIT? Could it have saved the first relationship away from home, or the loneliness that followed? Would it have helped with the grief of losing my Grandfather? I didn't know. I only knew I needed to build it, as much for myself as for anyone.

We launched on October 10th, 2016, World Mental Health Day, which happens to also be my birthday. I've since come to see there was nothing accidental here. Mental health was never a side project for me. It was the thread running through my whole life, waiting to be named.

Having been the patient too, I know how much a mind in crisis can affect the people around it. I wouldn't wish for anyone to suffer in silence. Reaching out for help is not a weakness. It is strength.

And there is a wider truth I can't leave unsaid. Mental health is not only diagnosis and crisis. Most of the people struggling are, clinically, perfectly well, yet imprisoned. We all live inside a jail of some kind. The unforgettable past we keep replaying. The early childhood beliefs we find hard to outgrow. The peer pressure we never quite shook. The relationships that didn't work out, the trust that was broken. The fear of what others think. The identity built entirely on achievement.

It took an illness, and confinement, for me to find the ground beneath all of it. But here is the thing I most want to say: that ground is not mine alone. It is the same foundation under everyone, whether the cage is a clinical one or the invisible kind almost all of us live in. I had to break to find it. You may not have to. That is why I write and share at all, not only for the person in crisis, but for anyone carrying a cage they have stopped noticing. Which, sooner or later, is all of us.

Notes shaped by Advaita Vedanta and the Bhagavad Gita, not as philosophy, but as something to live by.

There was another chapter: the founder, the striver, the one still certain the answer was out there to be built. I've kept a few pieces from those years, exactly as they were written.

Read from before

These are the recognitions I've come to live by, and keep returning to.