After IIT-Madras, National Institute of Design, becomes the second educational institution to make provisions for its students to deal with stress and anxiety and open up to counsellors.
Four year old start up YourDost, is an emotional online platform that offers counselling services round the clock, while keeping their identity of the users anonymous.
The institute has bought the services of YourDost so that the students can avail it for free.
YourDost was founded by Richa Singh, a graduate of IIT-Guwahati, after one of her batch mates committed suicide due to academic pressure. She had realised then the need to have someone to speak to, which can even help save lives. The platform allows instant access to users to share their problems through an online interface. A team of over 75 experts cater to the needs of the users.
Pradyumna Vyas, Director, NID, said, "While in today's world, technology has made connections easier, loneliness on other hand has also increased. These days, students go through a lot of pressure, career issues, anxiety, burden of expectation, etc. The pressure eventually reaches a level where they need to share and open up, to feel light and be guided on the right track. Hence, we thought of tying up with a professional body to ensure their mental and emotional well being.
While we can appoint counsellors on campus, it becomes difficult to avail their services 24x7. That apart, anonymity helps, as we have seen several times that students are less enthusiastic about turning up in person." This platform will deal with both these issues.
"The facility can be availed by students, faculty and entire NID community across all campuses," added Vyas.
Commenting on the initiative, an ex-student of Strategic Media Design at NID, Gandhinagar, said, "The initiative will be beneficial to students who often grapple with academic pressure and financial troubles. However, I feel that sharing things with a counseller in person helps build trust and hence it becomes easier to pour ones heart out. So I am not very sure about how much a will be willing to student share on an online platform."
