“The media reaches crores of people. By asking ourselves a few questions, we can bring in this human touch”
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Last week the NWMI (Network of Women in Media, India) held its annual meeting, which 189 women from across the country travelled to Guwahati to attend. One of the sessions was on navigating mental health. Pushpa Rokde, who works with the Hindi daily, Prakhar Samachar, was a panelist.

Pushpa reports from Bijapur, in Bastar, a left-wing-extremist-hit area in Chhattisgarh, part of the red corridor in India. Last month, a journalist from the area, Mukesh Chandrakar, who ran a YouTube channel, was killed, allegedly for exposing corruption in a road construction business.

I imagined Pushpa would talk about the challenges she suffers reporting from a Maoist-affected area. Instead, she said, “We need to consider what impact our story will have on the reader. How will it affect the community we are writing about?”

The Hindu has mental-health guidelines, so we use language carefully: For instance, we treat suicide as an outcome of many different factors and do not refer to an attempt as a crime (‘committed suicide’). Nor will we ever have a headline that screams that a child took their life after a fight with their mother.

But Pushpa’s talk went beyond the framing of guidelines, which is important of course because it is one small way of helping to change society’s narrative around mental illness as some personal failing or ‘mental weakness’.

“Why are we doing the story?” she asks us to consider. Caught up in the ‘routine’ filing of stories, we do not usually pause to ask this question. Or, something terrible has happened and we are so focused on getting various elements of the story out, that we may not have time to think about the ‘why’.

Journalists do stories for many reasons. But as the book The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, tells us, journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.

Telling the truth while being mindful of its impact on readers and the communities we write about requires a balance. We must accurately depict events while avoiding over-the-top details. After all, a child of a family caught in a fire may someday read about how their parent died — we would not want to add to their sense of loss now or trauma even a decade later. This balancing act is usually taken care of at the editing table.

As an editor, I have an internal dialogue with myself: ‘What if this happened to me, and my child had to read about it — what parts would I not want him to read?’ Or, ‘Do I want my community to be referred to as ‘marginalised’ — how would that make me feel about my situation?’

At an in-house workshop last year, where we delved into a long-form story on the Hathras stampede that took place in July 2024, the team attending said there were too many disturbing details of injuries a minor had suffered. They did not think it was necessary and felt we should have cut out certain graphic details at the editing stage. These internal checks and balances keep us on our toes, and we are now doubly conscious of carrying a trigger warning on any story that has violence or destruction.

Last week, I attended a workshop by Tanmoy Goswami, who runs the “independent mental health storytelling platform” Sanity. Tanmoy, a journalist, who writes from a lived experience lens, said one of the big themes of 2025 would be community mental health, which he calls “human touch at scale”.

The media reaches crores of people. By asking ourselves a few questions, we can bring in this human touch. Questions like: How do we frame the narrative so that people are disturbed enough to seek answers, but not triggered into a freeze? But also, as Pushpa says: “If there has been an incident between Naxals and the police, we must speak to both sides, but also to the villagers caught in the crossfire, so every voice is heard.”