Sep 04 2026 to Sep 04 2026 6:30 p.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Trauma is a silent epidemic in India, hiding in plain sight, embedding itself in our bodies, families, and relationships, and surfacing as anxiety, addiction, chronic illness, and quiet self-doubt that we rarely identify correctly.

Keeping survivor testimonies and science at the forefront, this panel discussion, based on the book Trauma Nation: Fighting India’s Silent Epidemic, will unpack how trauma travels through childhood, relationships, historical events such as Partition, and even our news feeds, and also explore why it so often goes unrecognised and unnamed.

How do we identify trauma when it hides behind everyday anxieties, addictions, and illnesses? And what might healing look like in the Indian context?

Presented by:

Venue: Library
Speakers

Nishtha Lamba
Mental Health Researcher, Professor & Author
Nishtha Lamba holds a PhD and MPhil in Psychology from the University of Cambridge and a BA from Hunter College, City University of New York. An Associate Professor of Psychology at Middlesex University Dubai, she leads two labs in Social Psychology and Trauma, and has worked with vulnerable populations for over a decade. Her research develops new approaches to healing trauma through technology. She publishes with leading academic journals and has written for The Indian Express, Scroll.in, and The Hindu.

Amandeep Sandhu
Writer & Journalist
Amandeep Sandhu is author of two mental health novels: Sepia Leaves (2008), about a family living under the shadow of schizophrenia from a young boy’s point of view during the Emergency, and Roll of Honour (2012), nominated for The Hindu Prize, about the split loyalties of a Sikh boy in a military boarding school in Panjab during the 1984 Khalistan movement. His award-winning non-fiction book, PANJAB: Journeys Through Fault Lines, is part-reportage, part-memoir, part-contextual history. He also wrote an e-book, Bravado to Fear to Abandonment: Mental Health and COVID-19 Lockdown, on mental health during India’s COVID-19 lockdown.

Pavitra Jayaraman
Co-Founder, The PARC
Pavitra Jayaraman is co-founder of The PARC, a social enterprise providing multidisciplinary training programmes in mental health for healthcare workers, mental health professionals, and caregivers. She previously headed editorial at White Swan Foundation, a non-profit that created a multilingual repository to democratise access to mental health information. As a journalist, she has worked with NDTV and Mint, and continues to write independently.