Sonal Finds Solace And Hope In Mental Health Recovery

Sonal didn’t always want to reconcile with her life here. A lover refused to marry her, and her family refused to take her in after her diagnosis, which revealed she had a mental illness that could make her lose her connection with reality and swing her moods to the extreme.

There is a friend who stares for long hours at the walls, hearing the voices of her dead lover. They talk sometimes, in their own languages. They fight too, in their own way. Both have been through abandonment. Perhaps that’s why they hold each other when the disease returns in its fury or when the world becomes too much to handle.

The sea isn’t far from here. And, like the tidal waves, the relapses come and go.

Sonal was born in Maharashtra and says she fell ill in school one day. She never really recovered. The pain was immense, and she was in and out of asylums and shrines for years. Someone told her Jesus was the god she needed, and she went—with her mother. Her sisters had their own lives. Her mother, too helpless to keep Sonal by her side.

So, Sonal sings hymns, her voice, with its pain, like the rain in a coastal town that is now home. She has been living in the Home Again project of The Banyan, which provides housing to people with mental health issues, helps them re-integrate into society, and works towards making them independent.

I first met Sonal in Chennai in 2024. She had come to speak about her lived experience at an event organised by The Banyan. She talked about love and her longing for a family, for love. Her family had refused to take her in, and when they called, they would never give her their address. Once she went to Nagpur to find them, but they dropped her back at the centre in Ratnagiri.

There is solace in the acceptance that there is love beyond family and a partner. What Sonal sings is a grace—for the refuge she found, for the friends she made, and for the perseverance of hope that never left her.

“God holds me. Here, I have found a family, and this is where I return to,” she says. “This is home. For now.”

In its August 21 issue, Every Day I Pray For Love, Outlook collaborated with The Banyan India to take a hard look at the community and care provided to those with mental health disorders in India. From the inmates in mental health facilities across India—Ranchi to Lucknow—to the mental health impact of conflict journalism, to the chronic stress caused by the caste system, our reporters and columnists shed light on and questioned the stigma weighing down the vulnerable communities where mental health disorders are prevalent.

This profile is part of a narrative set of lived experiences the residents of The Banyan shared with Outlook’s editor Chinki Sinha. They were published in August 21 issue Everyday I Pray For Love as The Bearable Lightness of Being.