interview fourty-one: deepika

The kindhearted and determined Deepika told us about her mental health focused organization, Curae, that she’d started to help others as a result of facing hardships in her own life. 

1. It’s lovely to speak with you, Deepika! In our chat we’ll have you talk about your passion for “helping.. the youth to achieve their goals and live their lives effectively with both success and happiness.” Why is this important to you? In your opinion, does success equate to happiness or should there be a balance of both? 

In today's world, it's very common to see people who aren't really happy or are mentally disturbed. Helping people achieve their goals and live their lives effectively with both success and happiness is important to me because I get to spread positivity to others. It gives me a sense of happiness when I get to create a positive impact in people's lives and help them reach their highest potential. 

In my opinion, there needs to be a balance between success and happiness. Both success and happiness play an important role in people's lives and it's necessary to have a balance between both of them.

2. You’ve started an organization, The Curae Organization, that reflects your mentioned passion of helping others. Through your organizational work, you also emphasize the importance of mental health awareness and self-love. When and how did you get the idea to create Curae? 

During the quarantine in 2020, I had the idea of starting an international youth-led organization after joining a lot of online Model UNs. These acted as a pathway for me to reflect my passion by coordinating with various individuals on a global scale sharing a similar idea of helping people. 

My passion for helping people has always been an integral part of my life since 4th grade. I have always been the "therapist friend" or the "advisor friend" in the group and I believe that this is one of the main things that opened my eyes towards the difficulties that people face in their lives. My dad had asked me to read self-help books and deliver 10-min presentations on what I learnt from them from the age of 12. Having good mental health is one of the first steps towards achieving your goals and finding happiness. A healthy mind is the pathway to success. I decided to combine these ideas and start Curae, an organization that helps people to achieve their goals and live their lives effectively with both success and happiness with a special emphasis on mental health and self-love.

I think the line that fits best with this situation would be, 'My dad wanted to change my life and I want to change everyone's lives around the globe'.

3. How, specifically, do you implement mindfulness, mental health information and self-care tips into your organization? How do you interact with your audience? 

We conduct weekly research and gain information from online sources and articles to understand more about these topics. Apart from online research, we talk to local therapists as well as therapists and psychologists online who give us details about mental health disorders and common problems that people have. Additionally, we also focus on talking to people who have experienced situations and are willing to share them with us so that we can spread awareness to a lot of people.  

We have weekly posts on our Instagram on mental health where we talk about mental health disorders, self-care and mindfulness. Apart from the posts, we've had workshops where we interacted with our audience through Zoom and plan on doing so in the future as well.

4. What are the greatest lessons you’ve learned through working on Curae? 

I believe that one of the biggest lessons I have learnt through working on Curae is that there is a lot more for me to learn, to understand and to implement in my own life as well. Learning and growing are continuous processes and they keep going on throughout a person's life. Curae taught me to create positive impacts in people's lives and help them reach their highest potential through hard work and determination. It also taught me to work on myself everyday and shape myself into a better version of myself every day. 

5. What are your goals for the future of Curae? What have been your biggest accomplishments so far? 

Curae aims to reach more and more people in the future to create a positive impact in their lives. Apart from this, well, let's see what our future holds for us.

I believe our biggest accomplishment so far is being able to help a lot of people look at the world in a new and colorful perspective through our workshops and informative Instagram posts. 

6. If comfortable sharing, do you have personal experience with the focused matters on Curae that had prompted you to help others going through similar hardships? 

I have been a victim of bullying for a very long time which made me lose my self-confidence and I had started hating myself. People I considered friends would body-shame me and if I felt bad, they would say that I was being overly sensitive. What had started with body-shaming soon came to the point that they humiliated me for everything that I did. Everything changed when I finally understood that the person who is bullying me is the one with the issues, not me. I am perfect just the way I am.

Having undergone hardships like these I wanted to make sure that nobody ever undergoes something like this. I didn't want them to feel the way I felt and that's also what prompted me to start Curae and focus on topics like this as well. Awareness about mental health issues and problems like bullying are very important and therefore, Curae plays a part in spreading information about topics like these as well.

7. Lastly, I’d love to thank you for reaching out to us. Best of luck with everything! Is there anything else you’d like to say before we wrap up? 

Nothing that I can think of, at the moment. Thank you so much for having me here! It was an honor!

In our latest interview, we spoke to the kindhearted and determined Deepika! She told us about her mental health focused organization, Curae, that she’d started to help others as a result of facing hardships in her own life. Deepika also discussed her understanding of living with happiness and how much she believes that it requires success as well as what goes into the research shared on Curae, her greatest accomplishments, lessons learned and her goals for the future. Deepika’s responses were incredibly motivating and the full interview will be posted to our website in the near future. Make sure to look out for that and stay well. ​