Meet-ups to fight stress

Acorporate employee’s life often appears enviable, but the surface gloss can hide plenty of cracks. Work stress is driving corporate staff in Delhi NCR to seek help from peer groups and life hack professionals.

Take the case of a senior communication manager working in Gurgaon. She had a troubled marriage because of a skewed work-life balance; her work demanded a lot of travelling, meetings. She sought counselling from Harsh Arora, a life coach who runs a meet-up group called Let’s Talk about Life. She attended group and individual sessions, “and finally, the couple found amicable solutions”, says Arora.

Just how terrible corporate stress can be was evident last year from the suicide of Vineet Whig, a 47-year-old Chief Operating Officer, who jumped to his death from a Gurgaon building. Reportedly, a suicide note said that he was “fed up” with himself. Recently, a 45-year-old BPO employee jumped to her death from her office building on Sohna road, Gurgaon. She was reportedly suffering from depression.

What stands between stress and death is a combination of counselling and drawing strength from others’ experiences. That’s where life coaches and self-help groups come in. Life coach Jasmin Waldmann has been conducting the Depression Free group coaching session for six months now in Gurgaon because that’s where it’s needed the most, she says, adding that the problem is most acute among the relatively young employees. Each two-hour session has five participants. “Everybody can speak up openly, share, and listen. The conversations are confidential,” says Waldmann. “Quite often, people are shy initially and don’t speak up. But if anyone else speaks, it helps others, too.” The effort to find practicable solutions. “Isolation is depression’s main weapon,” says Mridul Trehan, organiser of the Delhi Depression Support Group, which has over 300 members. He has been holding monthly meet-ups in Delhi and Noida, and plans to start them in Gurgaon as well. “The aim,” says Trehan, “is that one should be able to tell their story so as to not feel alone anymore.” He himself had to overcome a phase of depression, and now shares his recovery techniques with the others.

Harsh Arora’s life hack group, started four years ago, now has 600 members, who meet once a month at coffee shops and members’ houses in Delhi NCR. “Ever since news of WHO’s year-long campaign ‘Depression: Let’s Talk’ came out (this month), we’ve been getting more calls from people who have depression or feel lonely,” says Arora. “People open up to strangers more.”

PHOTO: ISTOCK