Akansha invited me on Alignment Talks to talk about workplace mental health, and I almost gave the polite version of this conversation. Programs, frameworks, best practices, the usual HR vocabulary. Nobody needs another episode of that.
So we went somewhere else instead.
The line I kept coming back to: the hardest part of mental health isn't therapy. It's the thirty seconds before someone decides to try therapy. Thumb hovering over the button, late at night, almost there. And then something stops them, and that courage doesn't come back for weeks. I spent a decade thinking about almost nothing else, and almost nobody designing HR programs is designing for that moment.
The other thing we argued about, in the good way: India's support system was never broken. It was invisible. The chai guy knows whose mood is off before HR does. The admin knows a team is tense before any manager reports it. And instead of building on top of that, we keep ripping it out to install frameworks designed for cultures that never had it.
Full conversation on YouTube →
