Navigating through Grief and Trauma, on 17th July, 2021, Saturday at 2:30 pm
Hello! Greetings from the IISc Wellness Centre!
The CoViD-19 pandemic has also brought with it unprecedented levels of grief and trauma. And especially after the deadly second wave, grief and trauma have touched all of us in one way or another.
Grief and trauma are not limited to experiencing the loss of a loved one. They are much more complicated and multi-layered than we tend to think, and they manifest themselves in different ways — be it a sense of anxiety and uncertainty about the future; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection; the loss of a job or a relationship; the loss of sense of security; or even just a sense of discomfort that seems to linger. The complex structure and nature of grief and trauma make it more difficult for us to even perceive and acknowledge them.
It is with this in mind that we, EMPATHS, along with the IISc Wellness Centre, are organizing a mini workshop, Navigating through Grief and Trauma, to help us explore the underpinnings of grief and trauma, and understand how they can affect us at an individual and at a societal level.
The speakers for this workshop are:
- Dr. Shoma Chakrawarty, Psychologist, Maniben Nanavati Women’s College, Mumbai
- Ms. Ashwini NV, Psychologist & Founder, Muktha Foundation
Dr. Shoma Chakrawarty (she/her) holds a Masters in Psychology from Sampurna Montfort College (Bangalore) and a Ph.D in Applied Psychology from Pondicherry University. Her doctoral work focused on cancer caregiving, an area that lies at the intersection of Clinical and Health Psychology. She has served as a postgraduate teaching faculty in Mount Carmel College (Bangalore), St. Francis College for Women (Hyderabad), and most recently, Nanavati Women’s College, affiliated with SNDT University in Mumbai. She has several publications in the areas of health and coping from different lenses like caregiving, gender, constructs like the sense of coherence and spirituality, as well as trauma. She is a certified counsellor from the Advanced Diploma in Counselling Program at Prafulta Psychological Services (Mumbai) and has a private therapy practice. She writes about mental health from her own perspective as a “human first, therapist later” on Instagram, @ithaka_mentalhealth
Ms. Ashwini N.V is the founder-director of Muktha Foundation, which is an organization committed to prevent interpersonal violence and promote mental health. She was earlier a faculty member in the Post Graduate Department of Psychological Counselling/Psychology at Montfort College, and Jain University, Bangalore. She is a counselling psychologist with practice and research interest in the area of intervention and prevention of interpersonal violence such as intimate partner violence, child abuse, bullying, etc. She was recognized as one of the 100 ‘leaders under 30’ from across the globe for her idea titled ‘FOCUS formula to foster mental health in low- and middle-income countries’ at St. Gallen Symposium, Switzerland in May 2015. Muktha Foundation was appreciated by Kailash Satyarthi, Nobel Peace Prize Winner for its collaboration with Young Indians of Confederation of Indian Industries for the Project – Masoom, a nation-wide initiative to prevent child sexual abuse in September 2017. She is the recipient of Rotary Bangalore’s Vocational Service Award 2018-19 for her work in the area of training and promotion of mental health. In the year 2019, she directed a campaign titled ‘Child Safety, National Priority’ where she travelled non-stop 90 days from January 1st to April 1st, 2019, to all the 29 states and 3 union territories to conduct over 150+ training sessions on ‘Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse’, thereby becoming the first person to have done this consecutively in the country. She recently led an emotional distress helpline during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.