Guest Lecture on ''Personal Responsibility and Psychology''

The Department of Psychology organised a session with Author and Clinical Psychologist, Mrs Pragati Jalan Surekha. The session touched on various essential aspects of Mental Health but the major tenet revolved around the importance of Mental Health Care for Mental Health Professionals. The session started with Mrs Pragati briefing us about the importance of Self-awareness to do justice as Mental Health Professionals. The ideas that were brought into realisation for the students during the session were:

1. Importance of holding space even for emotions that we label as “negative emotions”

2. The journey is as beautiful as the destination.

3. Mental health revolves around two questions, what is going really well and what is going really bad and how to work on the things that are going really bad with kindness and compassion.

4. You can only pour from a full cup and therefore self-care for Mental Health Professionals is exigent.

Further, each student was distributed Mrs Pragati’s New book, “Musings, an insight into me” and the session was opened for Questions and Answers from the audience.

The audience shared about their dilemma and the guilt they go through because of the difference between their Ideal me vs their Real me and how they can deal with it, the facilitator of the session helped the students build perspective around the topic by one of her poetry from the book, Real me Vs Ideal me.

We further touched on collaborating with our pain to develop insight about ourselves through the poem, Professor pain.

Additionally, we discussed poetries including, Wisdom, Becoming Me and The Malala effect where students learnt that struggles are opportunities for quantum leaps and that the journey of self-actualisation is a bittersweet process.

The author very kindly concluded the session by signing the copies of the book distributed to students followed by a Photo session.