In 2020, when the world shrank to the size of a house and a phone screen, Neda became a mother.
People tell her she was ‘blessed’ to have had so much time with her son, to have stayed indoors, to have avoided commutes and crowded spaces. It was not untrue. It was also not the whole story.
Becoming a mother in 2020 meant becoming a mother in a before-and-after world.
Daycare centres were closed. Household help was limited. Families were reshuffling roles under stress. “Caregiving responsibilities didn’t just vanish because I was home,” she says.
For her son, the first two years of life involved a very small circle of faces: his parents, his grandparents, and an occasional visit from her own parents when restrictions eased. When he finally started daycare, the transition was hard. Like most pandemic babies, it took him a while to settle into a new routine.
the afterlife of ‘work from home’
The pandemic rewired expectations: once women demonstrated they could work from home, care for children, supervise online classes, and look after elders all at once, it quietly became the new baseline. The infrastructure built in crisis calcified into cultural expectation.
“The expectation is now hardwired that you would be able to manage it all,” Neda says. “You’re expected to be grateful to work from home.”
What struck her most was how little structural change followed this upheaval. Work from home became a justification for inaction. If women could work from home, why did workplaces need to rethink maternity policies? Why did anyone need to re-examine childcare, return-to-work plans, or shared responsibilities?
“Before, you took a day off when you had to tend to a sick child. Now it’s a casual demand: why don’t you just work from home instead?” she says. “The burden shifts back onto women, again.”
we were promised a village
Neda, a trained counsellor, had spent years listening to other people’s lives, but the steady, disorienting churn of early motherhood inside a pandemic gave her pause. “I saw a lot of transitions, a lot of changes that I felt I wasn’t personally prepared for,” she says. So she did what counsellors do when they don’t have answers. She started listening again.
She spoke to other mothers. Women struggling with fertility treatments. Women managing painful periods and unexplained symptoms. Women caring for newborns in nuclear homes and joint families, in small towns and big cities. Over and over, she heard a similar pattern. Beyond the medical protocols and checklists, much of their journey was trial and error. They were guessing their way through reproductive health, fertility, pregnancy, and the months after birth. “I realised that there is very limited research out there,” she says.
At the time, Neda was working full-time as a counsellor, co-parenting a toddler, and managing a home. But the structural gap between what she was seeing and what the system could name bothered her enough to quit her job and enrol in a PhD in maternal mental health.
“If there is limited research,” she says, “then someone has to ask why women are so invisible in that research.”
a digital room of one’s own
Neda’s research sits inside this landscape. Her PhD looks at whether a structured, digital intervention can prevent or reduce depression during pregnancy and support women’s motivation to return to work after childbirth.
On paper, the design is straightforward. Pregnant working women join a small group that meets online for a fixed number of weeks. A therapist leads sessions that teach mindfulness techniques, basic breathing exercises, and ways to manage stress. They talk about their pregnancies, their fears, their anger, their exhaustion. They listen to each other.
The women in her study work in different modes. Some commute to offices. Some are in hybrid roles. Some work entirely from home. What they share is the sense of being pulled in many directions at once.
“An initiative that makes them feel heard, makes them feel understood, can help in preventing the onset of postpartum depression,” she says. “It doesn’t replace family or workplace support. It adds another layer.”
Neda’s doctoral research was made possible with 100% funding from F Plus Healthcare Technologies, one of the companies in investor Aasif Ahsan Khan’s biopharma ecosystem.
The analysis is complete. Early patterns suggest that these interventions helped women regardless of work mode, especially those who had moderate to severe levels of depression during pregnancy. The effect did not seem to depend on whether they were first-time mothers or had done this before. What shifted was their intrinsic motivation to work and their ability to connect with their own values around work.
There were limits. The programme did not magically improve every aspect of well-being. Without follow-up sessions, some of the positive effects faded. Her current study does not yet capture how maternity policies, managers, or supervisors influence the journey back to work.
“Motivation is one part,” she says. “Actual return to work depends on many other things.”
She reels them out rapidly, a checklist she wishes more people would read: systemic interventions by lawmakers. A manager who is willing to plan a staggered return. A partner who is on the same page about money and care. Family members who share childcare. Physical recovery from childbirth. Flexible options to work from home on some days and come in on others. Paid leave, where it exists. Conscious planning when it does not.
“Mental health interventions are one place,” she says. “They have to sit inside a larger system of support. They cannot be the only thing.”
This tension sits at the heart of her work. How do you build a mental health programme that doesn’t preach to women to look after themselves better, while everything around them gives them very little opportunity to do so?
didn’t they want to have it all?
It is a familiar pattern in wellness culture: when systems fail, individuals are told to meditate more, sleep better, drink water, and journal. She admits ruefully that if her intervention scales, it might place yet another burden on women to manage their own mental health, absolving families, workplaces and institutions.
“We don’t want the onus to fall on the mother,” she says. “There have to be other stakeholders.”
For her, the difference lies in where and how such programmes are offered. Right now, many are bolted on to existing structures as add-ons. Private hospitals sell birthing classes as a package upgrade. A few offer prenatal yoga sessions. Very few integrate routine mental health screening, or even basic conversations about mood, into pre- and antenatal care.
She imagines a different use of the same waiting rooms she has spent hours in. A quiet room where women can do breathing exercises while they wait for their turn. Short guided mindfulness practices along with blood pressure checks. A standard question about sleep and mood that is asked with the same seriousness as questions about blood sugar.
Workplaces, too, come up often in her examples. If companies can build lactation rooms or pumping spaces, she asks, why not build in time and space for mental health check-ins? Why not offer a structured programme during work hours, rather than treating it as something a woman has to squeeze into a day already stretched thin?
“A lot of the women in my study loved that the interventions were online,” she says. “They didn’t have to commute. For that one hour, they could be in their room, and someone else could take care of the child.”
Access is the word she keeps coming back to. If institutions do not “weave in” support, she fears programmes like hers will remain for those who can afford extra time and money, while everyone else continues to be told to think happy thoughts and be grateful.
sisypheus got nothing on motherhood
Recent global estimates from the World Health Organization suggest that around one in ten women experience postpartum depression. The numbers are not confined to any one class or country. They do not look impressive on a PowerPoint slide until you remember that each percentage point is a person somewhere, trying to make sense of why she feels numb, or angry, or nothing at all, at a time everyone assures her should be the happiest of her life.
Depression does not just affect the mother. It affects her ability to bond with the child, connect with family members, and carry out daily tasks. Left unchecked, it can intensify, leading to other mental health concerns.
Neda is careful not to reduce it to a single cause. She starts with the socio-economic layer. There is the familiar cultural script that women can, and should, “have it all”: a thriving career, a well-run home, emotionally nourished children, a good marriage, and ageing parents looked after. Nobody says, out loud, that something will have to give. Nobody spells out that different women may want different combinations of these things. The expectation is implicit and relentless.
“Women have this pressure of essentially excelling everywhere,” she says. “They can’t falter or fail at any place in their life. It’s a very unrealistic expectation from which men are exempt.”
Add to this the economic reality of life in Indian cities, where a dual income is often the difference between basic security and constant anxiety. The costs of nutrition, schooling, healthcare, and housing sit in the background of decisions about pregnancy, timing, and how soon to return to work.
Then there are the biological and family histories. A woman whose family has lived with depression or anxiety may be more vulnerable, in the same way that a family history of diabetes or heart disease shapes risk. A traumatic childbirth, a difficult pregnancy, a long and painful fertility journey: all of these can become entry points for anxiety or depression.
On top of that sits culture. The rituals around confinement after birth. The rules about what a new mother should eat and wear, how long she should stay indoors, and how quickly she should “bounce back.” Every community has its own codes. Many offer comfort and structure. Many also carry unspoken messages about what pain a woman is expected to endure in silence.
“We’re told over and over that pain is integral to motherhood,” she says. “Feeling low just becomes a part of motherhood. It’s okay, it will go away. Nobody says: It’s not okay, let’s talk about this.”
In that environment, postpartum depression is both prevalent and invisible. Hospitals want smiling mums on glossy brochures. Families want reassurance that the baby and mother are “fine.” Social media collapses complex experiences into five hacks and three affirmations. The word “depression” itself carries so much stigma that people dance around it, calling it “stress” or “mood swings” until something breaks.
building that village on purpose
The question of scale returns often in Neda’s answers. She is very clear that an intervention like hers cannot be a single product. It has to behave more like a network.
“If we go by the saying that it takes a village to raise a child,” she says, “then the entire village needs to come together to help the mother as well.”
In practice, that means different things for different women. For an urban professional with reliable internet, it might be an app with recorded modules, live group sessions, and the option to book one-on-one time with a therapist. For someone in a smaller town or village, it might be a web link shared by a doctor on WhatsApp, or a call into a facilitated group on a basic smartphone.
She imagines the intervention in layers – therapist-led groups, recorded materials in multiple languages, trusted experts answering questions about gynaecology, fertility and mental health. On the ground, community leaders and frontline health workers. “They don’t have to run the interventions,” she says. “But when they say this is important, that’s how word-of-mouth begins.”
For now, digital feels like the most honest starting point. “Right now, the only way I can reach a woman who’s working in Bangalore and a woman in tribal Odisha is through a mobile phone,” she says. If the content can reach her where she is, in language she understands, it is at least a beginning.
She knows the risks. Smartphones are not evenly distributed. Data is not always cheap. Digital literacy is uneven. But she would rather start there, imperfectly, than wait for the perfect parallel system.
not all rooms are equal
One of the more delicate questions she sits with is how to design groups that are honest about difference and still feel safe. What does it mean to run a session in which a woman who employs domestic help and the woman who cleans her house might both be present?
In her pilot, she watched how easily homogenous groups bonded: women with similar jobs and incomes, similar routines, similar reference points. But when someone with a very different life joined, the room would shift. Sometimes it opened up. Sometimes it went quiet.
Her answer is to make heterogeneity a deliberate part of the design, not an accident. The entry ticket to the group is not where you work or how much you earn. It is possible that you are pregnant or recently postpartum, and you are struggling. The work of the facilitator is to keep bringing the conversation back to what they share: the fear of not being a good enough mother, the difficulty of saying no to family, the guilt around work, the exhaustion of being told this is the happiest time of your life.
“If we can’t do that, then we’re just running classes by caste and class,” she says. “That would defeat the point.”
like making a baby
Getting a PhD is a long, drawn-out process. Quite like carrying a pregnancy to term and not without its ups and downs.
She tells of a meeting with the all-male board of a large hospital chain. She had approached them, hoping to run her research through their maternity centres. They listened, then told her, flatly, that postpartum depression did not exist in their hospitals. Their mothers were happy. If she wanted to prove otherwise, they said, she should first collect prevalence data from their wards.
She did the work, but when she brought the numbers back, they were waved away. Her numbers did not match their feedback sheets. They refused permission to use the data.
She was upset enough to question her decision to do a PhD at all. She worried about wasted months and funding timelines. Then, slowly, she reached the point in her own cycle she recognises now: the point where cribbing has done its job and the only question left is, “What do I do next?”
She turned to her Research Advisory Committee at Christ University, and together, they began to explore other routes: independent clinics, government health centres, and personal networks.
“It restored my faith,” she says. “They believed in me, so I felt I could do this.”
Over the next few months, she spent weekends in waiting rooms, talking to nurses and speaking to gynaecologists in smaller hospitals, and reaching pregnant women through posters and word of mouth. She was not, as she puts it, “cool about it” at the time. But by the end of the year, she had her participants. She had her baby data.
the quiet work of building space
When you ask Neda what has shaped her, she does not start with degrees or titles. She starts with motherhood and movement.
She was born in Uttar Pradesh and has lived in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and the United States. She studied psychology abroad and came back to India to work as a counsellor. That movement, she thinks, taught her to pay attention to cultural context: how the same experience can feel very different in different places, and how systems can either hold you or let you fall.
What she wants, in the end, is modest and enormous at once.
She wants women, wherever they are, to have at least one space where they can feel safe enough to be vulnerable. She wants them to have access to accurate information, not just hacks and reels. She wants them to know that they are not the only ones struggling, that the problem is not simply a private failure to cope.
“I might not have answers to all the questions they bring,” she says. “But they should feel that we will work on it together.”
On a screen somewhere, a small square fills with faces as another online group starts. Someone joins late from a parked car. Someone else mutes herself to tend to her crying baby. For an hour, they talk about sleep, guilt, work, and bodies that do not feel like their own.
It is not a perfect village. But it is, for now, a room. And sometimes a room, held steadily over time, is where change begins.
