In this deeply personal conversation, Vinta Nanda speaks with Sachin Chaudhry about mental health, emotional resilience, AI, education, spirituality, and transforming pain into systemic social change.

For Sachin Chaudhry, the journey into mental health advocacy did not begin in a laboratory, a policy forum, or an academic institution. It began much closer home — within the emotional upheaval of watching his younger brother struggle through a devastating mental health crisis that would alter the course of his family’s life forever.

What unfolded during those years was not only a deeply personal reckoning with suffering, helplessness, and stigma, but also a confrontation with the glaring inadequacies of systems that continue to respond to emotional distress only after it has already escalated into crisis.
In this reflective conversation with Vinta Nanda, Sachin traces the roots of a mission that has now evolved into a global movement across schools, communities, and educational systems.

The interview moves beyond the language of conventional mental healthcare and enters a far more urgent and philosophical inquiry: what if emotional distress could be recognized early, understood compassionately, and addressed before it reached a breaking point?
That question became the foundation of TrustCircle, an organization building the emotional well-being and prevention infrastructure for K-12 students and staff globally - TrustCircle is now the official DigitalX solution of the United Nations Development Programme and an official Top 51 program of the Healthy Brains Global Initiative - an endeavor of the WHO, UNICEF, and the World Bank. Sachin founded TrustCircle after stepping away from a successful corporate career spanning nearly two decades - combining behavioral science, emotional self-reflection, and artificial intelligence, TrustCircle attempts to shift mental health away from crisis-driven intervention toward prevention, awareness, and resilience-building. At its core lies a deceptively simple proposition — that emotional awareness should become as natural, measurable, and routine as physical health.

But Sachin’s work extends beyond technology. Through the BringChange Foundation, he has simultaneously worked on forging public, private, and government partnerships to create awareness and dismantle the stigma surrounding emotional vulnerability by creating spaces where students, teachers, parents, and communities can engage honestly with mental well-being. Together, TrustCircle and BringChange Foundation represent a dual intervention: one focused on systemic transformation within the K-12 education system, and the other on reshaping the cultural narratives through which people understand pain, emotion, masculinity, fear, sadness, and connection.

Over the years, his work has expanded across India, the United States, and other parts of the world, reaching millions of students and educators. Collaborations with organizations such as UNICEF, the World Health Organization research center for mental health, National Institute of Health Care and Research, and educational institutions globally have positioned TrustCircle within an emerging global conversation around preventive emotional health. Recognition from platforms such as Fast Company Most Innovative Company #8 in education, globally and inclusion within international mental health initiatives have further amplified the work. Yet what remains most striking about Sachin’s journey is not the scale of his achievements, but the emotional clarity and conviction with which he approaches them.

Throughout this conversation, he speaks candidly about grief, bullying, loneliness, parenting in the age of algorithms, the emotional consequences of social media, the failures of educational institutions, and the urgent need to embed emotional resilience into classrooms as fundamentally as literacy or mathematics. He also reflects on spirituality, faith, and the role his family — particularly his wife and brother — have played in sustaining his purpose through years of uncertainty and struggle.

At a time when the world is increasingly shaped by performance, distraction, hyper-connectivity, and emotional fragmentation, Sachin Chaudhry’s work asks a radically simple question: what happens when human beings are taught to pause, reflect, and understand themselves before the world teaches them how to perform for it?

This interview is not merely a conversation about mental health. It is a meditation on awareness, compassion, resilience, and the possibility of creating systems that honour the emotional lives of people before they break under the weight of silence.
Pain, Prevention, and the Invisible Crisis: On Personal Motivation
Vinta Nanda: Your journey began with a personal family experience—how has that emotional memory shaped the way you design systems today, especially around empathy and prevention?

Sachin Chaudhry: I think everything I am doing today comes from that one source of pain. My younger brother’s life changed completely because of what happened to him when he was a child, and in many ways our entire family’s life changed with him. We grew up in Ambala. My brother and I studied in the same school — St. Paul High School. He was extraordinarily bright. Every teacher used to praise him. He was the rising star of the family. We went to school together on the same bicycle. I was older than him and there was a very deep emotional bond between us.

But after I moved out of that school for my higher studies, something shifted in his life. He started getting bullied. At that age he was probably around eleven years old, and he carried all that pain silently within himself for almost one and a half years. Nobody noticed it. Nobody understood it.

He would only say that he did not want to go to school anymore.
Like most Indian families at that time, we misunderstood what was happening. We thought he was becoming stubborn or fearful of academics. We thought he needed encouragement. So we kept pushing him back into the same environment that was emotionally destroying him.
Eventually he had a complete breakdown.
I still remember getting that distress call. He was crying uncontrollably, and nobody could calm him down. We panicked and entered the mental healthcare system almost blindly.

Within weeks we were moving from doctor to doctor — Chandigarh, Patiala — and suddenly, at the age of twelve, my brother was diagnosed with a mental health issue after barely a few minutes of consultation. Today when I look back, it still feels unreal.
He was prescribed heavy antipsychotic medication. His body reacted badly. Then more medicines were added. Eventually electroconvulsive therapy entered the picture. He was still a child.

This was the mid-1990s. There was no internet. We trusted the system because we had no language or understanding around mental health. And that experience left a permanent mark on me. What stayed with me most deeply was not just his suffering, but the realization that everybody had missed the early signs — the family, the teachers, the friends, the system itself.

Two years later, during a solo trip to Vaishno Devi, something shifted inside me permanently. I met a yogi during the climb and, without even understanding why, I broke down in front of him. I cried and spoke about everything.
After listening to me quietly, he said something I have never forgotten: “If you want to find the purpose of your life, go back to your pain. You are already there.”

That changed me completely.
Until then I was asking questions like: Why my brother? Why my family? Why us? After that encounter, the questions changed.
I started asking: Why did nobody notice what was happening to him before the crisis? Why do systems only react after emotional collapse? Why is there no mechanism to identify suffering early?

That became the beginning of TrustCircle, even before the technology existed. I began imagining a future where a school counsellor could identify which five students out of a thousand were emotionally vulnerable — and more importantly, understand why. Because unless you understand whether a child is struggling socially, academically, or personally, intervention becomes generic and ineffective.
That was the seed.

And over time I realized that mental healthcare systems across the world function almost entirely as crisis-management systems. They wait for visible breakdowns. But emotional suffering is usually invisible long before it becomes visible.
Vinta Nanda: What strikes me while listening to you is that your work seems to come not from ideology or business ambition, but from witnessing helplessness very closely.

Sachin Chaudhry: Completely. In fact, I became emotionally disconnected from money very early because I realized professional success alone would never resolve what I was carrying inside me.
I worked across Europe and the United States for many years, and wherever I travelled I kept encountering people silently dealing with emotional pain. It was everywhere — offices, universities, families, public spaces.
And everywhere I saw the same thing: stigma. People were uncomfortable talking about mental health because society still treats emotional suffering differently from physical suffering.

I would ask people a simple question: “Isn’t the brain also a physical organ?”
Everyone would say yes.
Then why is emotional pain treated differently from a heart condition or diabetes?
The more I observed, the clearer it became to me that the global system was broken. It was not healthcare — it was sick care. Everything activated only after crisis.

And that model cannot scale because there are simply not enough psychologists or psychiatrists in the world to respond once people are already collapsing emotionally.
So, I became convinced that intervention had to move upstream. Especially into schools. Because that is where emotional patterns first begin forming.

My brother’s suffering began in school. Bullying became the entry point into decades of pain. Years later, he finally named the students who had bullied him. One of them later died by suicide himself.
That moment stayed with me deeply because it revealed something frightening — emotional suffering was not isolated. It was spreading silently through systems without anybody paying attention. That realization pushed me toward prevention.
On Mental Health Ecosystem

Vinta Nanda: You often speak about shifting from treatment to prevention. What are the biggest structural barriers preventing governments and institutions from adopting this model more widely?
Sachin Chaudhry: The biggest barrier is mindset. People still do not emotionally understand the urgency of this issue. Decision-makers continue to see emotional health as secondary rather than foundational. But children are the future consciousness of a nation. If a country wants to progress economically, socially, or politically, then its young people need emotional resilience. Without that, societies become unstable.

What I keep advocating is actually very simple: create structured spaces for self-reflection inside classrooms. Not once a year. Not symbolic workshops. Continuously. Two or three minutes of reflection inside every classroom every day can fundamentally shift emotional awareness. Because emotions themselves are not the problem. The inability to understand emotions is the problem.
Anger is not bad. Fear is not bad. Sadness is not bad. Joy is not superior to any other emotion. Context matters.

If children learn from an early age to observe their emotional states without shame, they gradually become more adaptive and resilient. But educational systems today are still largely designed around performance, output, and competition. Not emotional awareness.
Vinta Nanda: One thing—you must constantly confront the brutality of institutions, especially educational institutions, which often seem to prioritize students who are already functioning well while neglecting those who most need help. How do you deal with that?
Sachin Chaudhry: From 2015 to around 2021, almost nobody would listen to me because people could not see the problem. And when people cannot see something, they do not know how to allocate resources toward it.

Whenever I spoke about mental health, people would respond by saying, “Everybody looks fine.” At that time, when I would say that one in four students needed emotional support, people thought I was exaggerating.

Then COVID happened.

And suddenly mental health became a conversation inside every household. Adults experienced emotional fragility themselves. Families began recognizing that emotional resilience mattered. That period finally helped people connect to what I had been trying to communicate for years.
And once schools began introducing reflection spaces through TrustCircle, something fascinating happened: students started opening up voluntarily. Requests for help increased dramatically. Not because emotional suffering suddenly increased, but because emotional safety increased. That is the difference.
Students who previously avoided counselors due to stigma began seeking help—not just for themselves, but sometimes even for friends. Counselors became far more effective because instead of waiting passively for crises, they could proactively identify students needing support.

What we are trying to create is not simply a mental health intervention. We are trying to normalize emotional awareness itself. And that changes the culture of an institution from the inside out. Teachers begin feeling empowered. Students feel emotionally seen. Schools begin functioning not only as academic spaces, but as emotionally safe ecosystems.
That is the future I believe education systems need to move toward.

Technology, Trust, and the Future of Classrooms
Vinta Nanda: TrustCircle uses AI to predict emotional distress. How do you balance data-driven insights with privacy, especially when dealing with children?

Sachin Chaudhry: Privacy is absolutely central to everything we do because we are dealing with deeply sensitive emotional information, especially when it involves children and adolescents.
The first principle we follow is very simple: the data does not belong to us.
The schools, school districts, or institutions we work with retaining ownership of the data at all times. We sign formal agreements ensuring that nothing is ambiguous from the outset. If a partnership ends, all information is handed back to the institution in the required format, and nothing remains with us.

Second, we strictly follow the legal and data protocols of every country and region where we operate. Data never leaves the country in which it is collected.
Third, and this is extremely important, we do not monetize student information. We do not train our AI systems on student data in ways that exploit emotional behaviour commercially. We are not an advertising platform.
We see ourselves as custodians, not owners. That distinction matters enormously. The entire purpose of the platform is preventive support—helping schools identify who may need emotional attention and why, before a situation escalates into crisis.
Technically, everything is encrypted end-to-end, both in storage and transmission. Even when AI tools are involved, no third party gets access to sensitive information.

We are FERPA compliant in the United States, and we are also part of the EdSAFE AI Alliance alongside organizations such as Google.
But beyond the technical infrastructure, there is also a human side to privacy. Children need to feel emotionally safe. If students feel they are constantly being watched or monitored, they will never open honestly. That is why we are very careful about how information flows inside the system.

Vinta Nanda: I imagine parents would naturally have concerns about this.
Sachin Chaudhry: Absolutely, and they should. That is why parental consent is built directly into the architecture of the platform. Schools can choose between opt-in and opt-out models depending on their legal framework and local educational policies. Parents are informed clearly about what the platform is, how it works, and why emotional reflection matters.

But there is another layer here that is equally important. Young people are extremely protective of their emotional worlds. Adolescence is a very vulnerable stage of life. Students often fear being judged, misunderstood, or overexposed emotionally. So while parents absolutely need to be involved in serious situations—especially where there is risk of self-harm or harm to others—we also have to respect a child’s psychological space. If every emotional disclosure automatically reaches parents, teachers, or administrators, trust collapses.

The relationship that matters most is the trusted connection between the student and the counselor. Students need to know there is at least one emotionally safe adult inside the institution who genuinely understands what they are experiencing. That changes everything.
In many cases, students specifically ask counselors not to involve parents immediately because they fear overreaction or emotional invasion. And honestly, sometimes parents themselves are anxious, overwhelmed, or emotionally reactive. So timing and sensitivity become very important. The goal is not surveillance. The goal is emotional support.

Vinta Nanda: Listening to you, what becomes very clear is that the technology itself is not the center of the work. The emotional trust around the technology is equally important.
Sachin Chaudhry: Completely. Technology alone cannot solve emotional suffering. Technology can only become a bridge. On one side there are millions of students silently carrying emotional distress. On the other side there is a severe shortage of counsellors, psychologists, behavioral specialists, and psychiatrists. The role of AI is to help that limited support system identify who may need attention and why.
That is where prevention becomes scalable.

And honestly, the results have already been very encouraging. The United Nations documented some of our impact outcomes through its DigitalX initiative. One of the strongest indicators we observed was that requests for help increased almost fivefold.
Now that may sound alarming initially, but it is actually extremely positive. Because it means stigma is reducing. Students who previously suffered silently are now reaching out—sometimes for themselves, sometimes for friends. That shift from silence to expression is one of the most important changes we are seeing.

On Education Systems

Vinta Nanda: If social-emotional learning were to be embedded globally like mathematics or science, what do you think would fundamentally change inside classrooms?
Sachin Chaudhry: I genuinely believe emotional resilience is one of the most important life skills children can develop. And it cannot happen through occasional workshops or symbolic mental health campaigns. It has to become continuous.
The moment educational systems formally recognize the importance of emotional reflection, classrooms themselves begin transforming. Students start receiving a very powerful message from the institution: “Your emotional life matters.” That alone changes the relationship between students and schools.

Right now, most educational systems are designed almost entirely around achievement, testing, and performance metrics. But children are not machines. They are emotional beings navigating family stress, social pressure, loneliness, bullying, comparison, academic fear, digital overload, and identity formation—often all at once. Yet classrooms rarely create safe spaces for students to process any of that.

So, what happens? Emotional pressure accumulates silently until it eventually erupts as anxiety, withdrawal, aggression, burnout, or self-harm. But if schools intentionally create even a few minutes of structured self-reflection every day, students begin reconnecting with themselves. The process itself can remain flexible. For younger children, it could involve simple emotional exercises, breathing practices, emojis, storytelling, or reflective games. Older students may privately express and observe emotional patterns. The important thing is not the format. The important thing is continuity. Because continuity slowly builds emotional awareness.

And when students begin feeling emotionally safe, they also begin opening up more honestly—not only about themselves, but about their friends as well. That changes the entire ecosystem. Teachers begin understanding that their role is not merely academic delivery. They become part of a much larger emotional support structure. And interestingly, this does not necessarily create more burden for teachers. In many ways it empowers them.

Teachers start feeling that they are contributing to something far more meaningful than syllabus completion. They realize they may be helping prevent emotional collapse or self-harm in a child’s life.
Vinta Nanda: I suppose that is your ultimate goal — helping people open up emotionally and removing the stigma surrounding emotional life itself.

Sachin Chaudhry: Absolutely. Because one of the biggest problems today is that people begin defining themselves entirely through emotional labels.

I once met a man who casually introduced himself by saying, “I am clinically depressed.”
So, I asked him what that meant personally.
And he simply repeated: “My doctor told me I’m clinically depressed.”
That stayed with me because emotional states are not fixed identities. Human beings move through emotional experiences continuously. Sadness, hopelessness, fear, anger — these are all part of being human. But society often boxes people into permanent identities around those emotions.

What children really need to learn is awareness.
Why am I feeling this way? What environmental factors are influencing me? Can my awareness shift? Can my emotional state shift?
Sometimes even a small change in environment, routine, attention, sleep, or perspective can begin changing emotional patterns. That is why emotional education matters so much. Because ultimately, the goal is not perfection. The goal is resilience. And resilience grows when people understand that emotions are transient, understandable, and human — not something shameful to hide from the world.

Stigma, Social Media, and the Future of Emotional Resilience:
Vinta Nanda: Through BringChange Foundation and TrustCircle, you are also addressing stigma at the grassroots level. Have you seen meaningful cultural shifts in the way communities engage with mental health?
Sachin Chaudhry: Yes, absolutely. In fact, that shift is one of the most encouraging parts of this journey. What we are seeing is that once emotional reflection becomes normalized within a school ecosystem, the culture itself begins changing organically. Parents start communicating more openly with teachers. Teachers begin collaborating more closely with counselors. Students start looking out for one another emotionally.

The culture slowly shifts from “me” to “we.” That is a very powerful transition because emotional suffering isolates people. Stigma thrives in silence and separation. But the moment emotional experiences become discussable, communities begin healing collectively.
Within TrustCircle, we intentionally created ways for students and teachers to acknowledge kindness, gratitude, and positive support. People can appreciate one another publicly for compassionate behavior or emotional support.

What is fascinating is how quickly emotional awareness spreads once people begin feeling emotionally safe. Acts of kindness that may once have gone unnoticed suddenly become visible and valued across the community. And equally important, difficult emotions stop being treated like personal failures.

Sadness becomes okay. Fear becomes okay. Anger becomes okay.
One of the greatest mistakes society makes is trying to divide emotions into “good” and “bad.” But emotions themselves are not the enemy. They are signals. What matters is awareness and context.
Vinta Nanda: Gender also plays a very large role here. Boys are still taught not to cry or appear vulnerable, while girls are often stereotyped as being “too emotional.” What strikes me while listening to you is that you are not simply building a mental health platform — you are potentially shaping an entirely different emotional culture for the next generation. Ten or fifteen years from now, these children will become leaders, policymakers, artists, parents, and decision-makers. Do you think this could fundamentally change society?
Sachin Chaudhry: I do. And honestly, I think this shift is becoming necessary for survival. The world young people are growing up in today is emotionally overwhelming.
Geopolitical instability, economic uncertainty, social polarization, climate anxiety, nonstop information cycles — children are absorbing all of this continuously.
And at the same time, they are growing up inside digital environments that are shaping their attention, emotions, and identities in ways we still do not fully understand. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Facebook are constantly feeding children emotionally manipulative content.

The algorithms are designed to maximize attention, not emotional well-being. And that changes the psychology of entire generations. We are increasingly raising children inside environments where comparison, validation, stimulation, and distraction never stop. Without emotional resilience, it becomes extremely difficult to cope with that level of psychological pressure.
That is why I believe resilience is going to become one of the most important survival skills of the future. Not because people can control the world—they cannot. But because they can learn to strengthen themselves emotionally while navigating the world.
Vinta Nanda: I come from the entertainment industry, and one of the reasons I entered storytelling was because I felt deeply concerned about the impact stories have on the human mind. But social media seems to have transformed entertainment into something even more psychologically invasive.
Sachin Chaudhry: Completely. Honestly, it is frightening.
Take Instagram for example. If you open the discovery feed today, a huge percentage of what gets pushed toward users is sexualized, emotionally manipulative, or psychologically addictive content. And this is not accidental. Algorithms study micro-behaviors constantly.
Even if you pause on a particular reel for a fraction of a second longer, the system interprets that as preference and immediately begins feeding you more of the same material. Over time, that shapes attention, emotional conditioning, and even identity. That is why awareness becomes so important.

The only real protection is conscious decision-making. Every decision we make either strengthens us or weakens us emotionally. Nobody remains emotionally stationary. If a person spends eight or nine hours doom-scrolling every day and then feels emotionally hopeless, that emotional state is not surprising. The mind is absorbing endless stimulation without reflection, grounding, or silence. I often explain this to my son through a very simple example.

I ask him: “If I told you to walk through the neighborhood and constantly look into everybody’s windows, would you do it?”
He immediately says no.
Then I tell him: “That is essentially what social media has normalized. Endless peeking into fragments of other people’s lives.”
And suddenly the absurdity becomes clear.
Vinta Nanda: Which means parents become equally responsible in this process. Because many adults themselves are trapped inside these same digital patterns.

Sachin Chaudhry: Exactly. Children learn far more from observation than instruction. If parents themselves are constantly anxious, distracted, reactive, or endlessly scrolling through social media, children absorb that behaviour immediately.
The only real way to teach emotional balance is through practice. Children need to see emotional stability modelled around them.
I often tell my son that social media was originally created to connect people, but in many ways it is now disconnecting them emotionally. Relationships are becoming fragile because they are increasingly dependent on likes, shares, validation, and digital performance. But real human connection is much deeper than that.

Can people sit together without phones? Can they have meaningful conversations? Can they support one another emotionally?
That deeper social fabric is slowly eroding.
At the same time, I am also seeing hope. Young people themselves are beginning to recognize the problem. My son and his friends now consciously decide to spend time without digital devices. They leave their phones aside and reconnect with one another directly. That awareness itself gives me hope.

On Future Vision

Vinta Nanda: Looking ahead ten years, do you see mental health becoming a standard daily practice globally, or are we still far from that tipping point? What needs to happen to get there?
Sachin Chaudhry: I think we are moving toward that tipping point much faster than people realize. Not because society has suddenly become emotionally enlightened, but because the pressures human beings are living under are intensifying rapidly.
People are exhausted. Children are exhausted. Families are exhausted. And eventually societies reach a stage where emotional resilience stops being optional. It becomes essential.

I believe the future of mental health will not lie only in hospitals or therapy rooms. It will increasingly become integrated into daily life—schools, workplaces, homes, communities. But for that shift to happen, emotional reflection must become normalized rather than medicalized.
People should not feel that paying attention to their emotions automatically means something is wrong with them. That is one of the biggest misconceptions we still carry.

Mental health is not separate from life. It is life.
The brain is a physical organ. Emotional well-being is part of overall well-being. And the earlier children understand this, the healthier societies become.

I genuinely believe emotional resilience should eventually become as foundational inside education as literacy or mathematics. Not because every child will become emotionally perfect—that is impossible—but because emotionally aware human beings make healthier decisions for themselves and for society.

And honestly, spirituality also plays a role in this for me. There were years when nothing seemed to move forward. Nobody paid attention to this work. I had left my corporate career in the United States, exhausted my savings, and spent years building something people could not yet fully understand.

Those were some of the lowest moments of my life. What sustained me during that period was faith.
My wife has been deeply spiritual, and through her I became more connected to nature as a bigger force. But spirituality for me ultimately became less about religion and more about conviction. There were moments when I questioned everything I was doing. And during those moments, my wife would ask me one simple question: “Do you genuinely believe you are spending your life in the right direction?”
Every time I looked honestly within myself; the answer was yes.
And she would say: “Then you do not need the world’s approval. You only need to stay connected to your inner self and your faith.”
That stayed with me.

Because very few people get the opportunity to dedicate their lives to something they truly care about. And perhaps that is where resilience really begins — when purpose becomes stronger than fear.

Thought Factory, Ideas That Question Power, Perspective Shift, Deep Thinking, Critical Conversations, Opinion With Integrity, Thinking Aloud, Intellectual Space, Reflective Journalism, Questions That Matter,