25-year-old Nitya Kanuri’s Mana Maali initiative makes mental health services more accessible to Indian students.
By Raif Karerat
In a three-month pilot project launched earlier this year, about 200 students at the Hyderabad campus of the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, colloquially known as BITS, and another city university used a cell phone app to monitor their mental health and communicate with counselors by phone and text.
Introducing the cell phone app to the southern India city was the idea of Nitya Kanuri, a 25-year-old research assistant at the Stanford School of Medicine, whose Mana Maali initiative, which means “gardener of the mind,” aims to make mental health services more accessible to Indian students.
The app was developed by Lantern, a San Francisco-based startup that wants to introduce “simple coping strategies in a country where few people discuss stress or psychological trauma openly and seeking treatment often carries a major stigma,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
The day the pilot program was introduced at the picturesque BITS campus north of the city — which is home to a plethora of India top-echelon universities — Kanuri said that she and administrators were “overwhelmed” by the interest from the student body.
Counselor Kumudini Velanand told The Times that young people face intense pressure to excel.
“Each and every family wants their child to be an engineer or doctor, whether they want to do it or not,” said Velanand, who counseled students as part of the Lantern project. “Even if they did well in high school, once they come to college and they are put in with hundreds more students, they find it very difficult. But they can’t talk to their parents about it, and they are reluctant to tell their peers.”
Students completed an initial survey on their phones to measure their stress levels and did daily exercises on the app, like deep breathing and muscle relaxation, reported the L.A. Times. Counselors subsequently conducted phone conversations with students and then checked on their progress through text messages.
Smita Sharma, a part-time counselor at BITS, said online therapy is cheaper than training more counselors and meets the confidentiality needs of students.
“This is very much in step with managing that stigma, where you can reach out to somebody and help yourself in the privacy of your room,” she said.
Kanuri, who is tracking students’ progress as part of her wellness-based initiative, plans to proliferate it to several other Birla Institute campuses in the near future.
Meanwhile, Megan Jones, Lantern’s chief science officer, has attested that the company’s studies indicate the program helps users reduce anxiety levels by up to 40 percent.