About me

I am a lived experience expert, mental health storyteller, and former newsroom leader with top publications. I bring all these experiences to bear as the creator of Sanity by Tanmoy, India's first independent reader-funded mental health storytelling platform, which has subscribers in over 50 countries. My expertise and interests I am excited about the intersection of these four themes: 1. Mental health advocacy with a lived experience lens. 2. Business and technology. 3. Culture of mental health in workplaces. 4. Niche media entrepreneurship, AKA the creator economy. I love helping people and organisations engage with these issues and start conversations that could seed real change. For instance: 1. If you are a business leader, I believe it's time you got rid of the wasteful idea of employee 'happiness' and pivot your policies towards humanity instead. 2. If you are a mental health entrepreneur, your startup needs to bake in lived experience expertise and ethical tech principles from Day Zero. 3. If you are a psychology student, you need to develop awareness of the big currents shaping the mental health movement globally. 4. Investors and philanthropies: the mental health community needs you to support projects that respect and meaningfully embed lived experience. 5. If you are a media professional or a newsroom leader, I'd love to talk to you about why mental health is not a 'soft' beat, and how following the principles relevant to mental health journalism can make all of your journalism much better and more valuable to your audience. 6. If you are an independent media entrepreneur or are planning to become one, I'm happy to share with you what I have learnt from my journey so far, including insights on building reader relationships and staying ad-free. Detailed bio I am not a mental health professional, wellness guru, or coach. 'Consulting', as that term is broadly understood, is not my thing either. I don't work with PPTs and Excel sheets (though I can). My strength lies in telling powerful stories centred on the human mind. I geek out on perspectives and insights 100% rooted in lived experience, using my vantage as a person with mental health challenges as well as a professional journalist. I love nuanced and respectful conversations. I am allergic to bullshit. Before shifting to mental health journalism to make sense of my own lifelong mental health challenges, I worked as an editor and writer in giant corporations, tiny startups, and top mainstream media outlets for over 13 years. *I spent a significant part of my journalism career understanding and writing about tech startups. *I was the youngest managing editor of a magazine cofounded by a former dean of Harvard Business School, and the founding editor of India's first innovation magazine. *I headed the desk at Fortune magazine's Indian edition and helped build ET Prime, the subscription-based platform owned by India's largest pink paper, The Economic Times. *In 2016, I was the joint winner of the Prize for Economic Journalism in Asia awarded by IE Business School, Madrid. *I am an advisor to Project SIREN, India's first-ever programme to monitor and evaluate the quality of media reporting on suicide. I am also part of various work groups on suicide prevention. *In 2021, I was selected for the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at the Newmark Business School, City University of New York. *In 2022, I was invited to speak on the creator economy in Asia at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. (Thanks to my friends at Splice Media, Singapore.) *I was a fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, researching mental health journalism in the global south between October 2022 and April 2023. Lived experience expertise is real, game-changing expertise, but it is habitually disrespected and exploited. Many lived experience experts have uncertain income streams, but they are unfailingly generous with their time and wisdom. Whether or not you and I decide to work together, I urge you to please pay any lived experience expert for their (emotional) labour – even if it's for a panel discussion or a fireside chat in your organisation. Let's talk.