Woman Turns Childhood Trauma Into Mental Health Platform

Neha Kirpal was five years old when her mother warned her not to brush her teeth because the toothpaste was poisoned. It would take years before she understood she was living inside schizophrenia, an illness that affects millions in India but was rarely discussed in the 1980s.

For Neha, childhood meant barricading doors at night, hiding under tables during fights, and watching police arrive at the door. Her mother's paranoia created a home where safety disappeared without warning, and reality shifted in ways no child should have to navigate alone.

At thirteen, everything collapsed. Her mother took Neha and her younger brother and said they were never going back home. Neha ran back to what she knew as normal life, not realizing she wouldn't see her mother and brother again for a decade.

"I spent all of those years looking for them," she says. Meanwhile, she kept showing up to school, excelling in sports like badminton and hockey, running ten hours a day to outpace the chaos inside her head.

She calls it dissociation now, this splitting of her inner world from her outer one. At the time, it was simply survival, the only way a teenager could function when half her family had vanished and nobody was asking if she was okay.

The Ripple Effect

Those ten years of searching while parenting herself became the foundation for something transformative. Neha eventually co-founded Amaha, a mental health platform designed to expand access to care across India, where mental illness still carries overwhelming stigma and treatment remains out of reach for millions.

The platform she built addresses exactly what her family never had: accessible support, open conversations, and care that doesn't hide behind closed doors. What began as one child's experience of isolation has grown into a resource helping countless Indians navigate their own mental health journeys.

Her mother and brother were eventually found, and her mother finally received proper treatment. The furniture no longer blocks the doors, and the poisoned toothpaste belongs only to memory now.

Today, Neha's childhood survival skills serve a different purpose: helping transform how an entire country understands and responds to mental illness, one person at a time.