British-Indian student launches mental health website to fight stigma, show there’s ‘light at the end of the tunnel’
- Tanya Marwaha, 20, created ‘Championing Youth Minds’ after realising youth in British-Indian families found it hard to seek help for their struggles
- Many of the 4,000 site visitors so far have South Asian backgrounds. ‘They often say how hard it has been to speak up,’ said Tanya.
Tanya Marwaha was barely a teenager when she first began struggling with her mental health, affected by one bereavement after another over a six-year period, through accidents as well as natural causes. That time is still so raw that she struggles to talk about her anguish.
During the pandemic, though, she realised that there were many other young people like her who were suffering, and somehow she gathered the strength to launch a website to help others with their mental health problems.
Many of those she has helped are students like her, a significant number of them from South Asian backgrounds. Setting up “Championing Youth Minds” has also helped Tanya’s own mental well-being.
“It helped me during a difficult time in my personal life to open up about my struggles in a way I knew was helping others too. I really found peace in that,” she said.
Her father came to Britain from Chandigarh in 1993. Her mother was born in Britain to Indian parents from Punjab. Tanya says she herself is so connected to Indian culture “that growing up I never used to fit in. People still think I was born in India”.
