The Better India · 8 hours ago

'From Child Carer to Mental Health Co-Founder: 40 Years of Loving My Mother with Her Schizophrenia’

Neha Kirpal spent the first two decades of her life hiding a truth too heavy to name - a mother whose paranoid schizophrenia went undiagnosed for nearly ten years, a childhood given over to caregiving, and a silence held in place by shame. "For the first 20 years of my life, I wanted to be as far from my truth as possible," she writes, and that distance cost her a sense of self that would take decades to reclaim. What she built from that loss is extraordinary: Amaha, a mental health platform now reaching 600 cities across India, and the India Mental Health Alliance, a national network of nearly 400 organizations - not despite her suffering, but directly because of it. Yet what makes her story quietly radical is not the scale of what she created, but the personal reckoning underneath it: the recognition that caregiving is not an identity, and that the person tending to everyone else is also worthy of tending. "Every time you share," she writes, "it changes the room" - and Neha Kirpal has spent forty years learning, at great cost, exactly how true that is.