Sva Inner skills for navigating life.
We run NAVIGATE Circles: small peer groups where young people talk about the hard parts of growing up, with someone their own age listening.
Ask for the workbook Free. We post or email it to you ourselves, so tell us who you are and we will send it.The numbers are loud. The quiet is louder.
adolescents aged 10 to 19 lives with a mental health condition.
of all mental health conditions begin by the age of 14.
go undetected and untreated.
Source: World Health Organization, Mental health of adolescents fact sheet. Todo re-check all three figures against the live fact sheet on the day this goes up. WHO revises them.
The last figure is the one we can do something about. Not the illness. The quiet around it.
Four things happen, in this order.
Gather
The same small group, meeting on a schedule. Same people, same promise that what is said in the circle stays there.
Check in
Everyone speaks before anyone advises. One round, no interrupting, no fixing. Listening first is the actual rule, not a slogan.
Navigate
One theme at a time. Exam pressure, friendships, home, change. We practise a small tool for it together rather than talking about it in the abstract.
Signpost
When something is bigger than the circle, we help each other reach a counsellor or an adult who can act. Nobody carries it out of the room alone.
One session is forty five minutes, once a week. One student leads it and everyone else takes part. Leadership rotates each week, so it is not one person’s job for a term. A teacher protects the time and the room, helps the first leader prepare, and then stays out of it.
Source: the NAVIGATE School Well-being Coordinator Guide, which is the half of the toolkit written for the adult rather than the student.
Four rules, and everyone knows them.
These are printed in the toolkit rather than left to whoever is in the room that day. The last one is the one that matters most.
Pass
Anyone can pass on a question, a turn, a drawing or a written answer, and does not have to say why.
Stay
People stay for the full session. If someone needs to leave, they tell the student leading first.
An ordinary concern
Anyone can raise something and pause the activity. The leader listens and keeps it anonymous. No teacher needs to be told.
Possible harm
If something suggests a person may be unsafe, the leader stops the meeting and goes to the teacher straight away. This one is not a judgement call.
And three things it is not.
Not therapy.
Nobody in the circle is a clinician and we do not pretend otherwise.
Not a replacement for a counsellor.
It is a way of getting to one sooner. If the circle is the only support somebody has, the circle has failed them.
Not run by an adult.
A trained student facilitates it. The first person anyone our age tells is almost never a grown up, and building around that fact is the whole idea.
What they said they wanted to be.
Every line here was written by a child, on a piece of card, with a felt tip. Spelling is theirs. No one is named.
That is the whole argument. Nobody wrote it for her.
An afternoon in Bengaluru.
Scissors, glue sticks, a floor covered in magazine cut outs, and a lot of gold glitter. Everybody made a board about what they want to be.
The boards were the beginning of the workbook. What the children said they wanted, and what they said got in the way, is what NAVIGATE was built around. It is seventy six pages in three parts, Within, Circle and Together, and it is a workbook rather than a book: most pages are blank until somebody fills them in. Some pages are private. Others are meant to be done with other people.
It was written with Dr Abhishek Karishiddimath, Scientist and Team Lead at the ICMR Centre for Advanced Research at NIMHANS in Bengaluru, and Dr Poonam Sharma, Associate Professor of Psychology at VIT Vellore. Shonairra interviewed students in Grades 8 and 9 across Bangalore first, and the workbook is built on what they said rather than on what adults assumed.
The research underneath it, including the ICMR and NIMHANS study on what a parent’s phone feels like from the other side of the room, is set out on Shonairra’s own site.
No photographs of the children themselves are published here, and no video, because guardian consent has not been confirmed. See the note in the footer. There are sixteen clips from the session and they can go in as soon as consent exists. Todo consent, still outstanding.
The numbers, when we have them.
We would rather show you nothing than show you a number we cannot stand behind. These go up when they are counted. Todo
Hi, I am Shonairra.
I am sixteen, I am from Bengaluru, and I am studying for the IB at Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland. I am going on to read psychology.
I started Sva because of something I kept noticing and could not unsee: people my age carrying heavy things very quietly, and doing an extremely good impression of being fine. Usually the thing that would have helped was one honest conversation, earlier, with somebody who was not going to panic.
For four years I have trained as a Well-being Ambassador at school, which mostly means learning to listen without immediately trying to be useful. Last year I interviewed seventeen adolescents for a study with ICMR and NIMHANS about what it feels like when a parent is on their phone. I was first author on it. Sva is what I did with the answer.
I wrote the NAVIGATE workbook because I know what it is like to carry something difficult without knowing how to manage it. I was bullied from a young age, and for a long time I thought everyone except me was coping. The more I talked to my friends, the more I found out that everyone was going through a version of the same thing.
Todo The second paragraph is assembled from documented facts in her register. The third is now drawn from her own foreword to the workbook, which is better than anything built from a CV. Confirm she is happy for it to appear here, and confirm she wants Institut Le Rosey named publicly.
Start a circle where you are.
Two books. The workbook is for the student: seventy six pages of activities in three parts, Within, Circle and Together. The coordinator guide is for the teacher, and is mostly about staying out of the way properly.
Both are free. There is no download button, on purpose: tell us who you are and where you are, and we send them to you ourselves. That way we know who is running a circle and can answer when something goes wrong.
If you are a school, say so and we will send the coordinator guide with it.
