Are you feeling anxious? These illustrated products aim to help you deal with your mental health better

Artist-forward brands are making mental healthcare tools more fun with well-illustrated products, and in turn destigmatising mental health

Five things you see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste—the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding method is a sensory exercise to make you feel calm when you are anxious or overwhelmed. It’s one of the more common tools that psychologists teach their patients to practice. Often though, when one is anxious, it’s tough to remember to go over this exercise if the habit has not been built. That reminder comes in the form of Rum and Raisin Studio’s grounding keychain.

Rupambika Khandai

Brands are now going to the drawing board and chalking out products that help mental well-being and self-care. But before anyone dives into using these products, Dr Kedar Tilwe, Consultant Psychiatrist, Fortis Hospital in Mulund and Hiranandani Hospital in Vashi, warns, “You need some sort of understanding as to which technique you’re going to use. Blindly following these techniques will not help. In fact, it may worsen a situation by making you feel like you are not able to do a simple thing. Take gratitude journaling as an example, some people actually respond extremely well to it but some people might find it difficult to write it down. So, it requires your psychiatrist or your psychologist to help you understand whether you can use these tools and how they would help you.”

The Thought Co, run by a group of psychologists, creates tools such as affirmation cards and journaling prompts, to help support therapy

Thankfully, brand founders are cautious of this and are backed by psychologists and therapists who are actively collaborating to create products to help mental health patients. This synergy of artists and therapists has resulted in a range of well-designed products that are fun to use, and contribute to destigmatise mental healthcare. 

Priyanka Varma

As a neurodivergent illustrator and visual designer with ADHD and Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Tanvi Parulkar, founder of Rum and Raisin Studio, first began designing products to help her with her own struggles. “I spent a lot of time with a therapist to work on my personal experiences with anxiety and ADHD. At that time, I started creating art as a source of expression and also as a way to make the process of taking care of my mental health a little more fun for myself. When I started creating tools I made them by hand just one at a time for myself, and I realised that there could be something here that could be helpful to people like me,” says Parulkar. Her first product, the Worry Stones, which have cute animal caricatures that one can hold and squeeze to focus on touch. Parulkar distributed her prototypes first to a few friends who also suffer from anxiety, and soon enough began to make them to sell. 

The first product Tanvi Parulkar, founder of Rum and Raisin Studio, created were the Worry Stones one can hold and squeeze as a grounding technique for those with anxiety. The studio’s products also include other self-care products such as the grounding keychain and habit-tracking journals

It was the turning point for her business and Parulkar shifted gears in 2023 from selling handmade polymer clay earrings in 2021 to selling art supplies for anxious adults. “I am my own audience,” she laughs. Now her shelf of products includes collectables with anxiety art fuelled with humour, self-help tools like an anti-anxiety kit with reminders, the grounding keychain, and downloadable printables that include the feelings wheel, and routine builders. “I run concepts by my therapists and we discuss what are the common tools that could be applied to most people with anxiety or ADHD. Example, people with ADHD struggle with consistency, hence, we create habit trackers. All of these are simple tools that don’t need a diagnosis or anything that’s more on a clinical level,” she says.

Tanvi Parulkar

Twillo Story follows a similar mindset while creating products. Founder Rupambika Khandai too is an artist who began illustrating journal covers, puzzles, habit tracker notepads, sketchbooks and more. Khandai launched her brand in 2021, but did not want to be yet another pretty stationery brand in the market. “I wanted it to have some impact and to be meaningful. Over time like I realised that during the pandemic I used to spend a lot of time illustrating and journaling, exploring and experimenting with those kind of things made me realise that it [journaling] actually makes me feel really good. It is the only time when I’m focused, and I’m engaged in an activity and I’m not worried about so many other things,” she says. It made her realise that she needs to put this out there through her brand. At Twillo Story, you will find notepads for anxiety relief, productivity, and self-care that have prompts and questions you can fill out to ground yourself and feel calmer. There are also affirmation puzzles, sketchbooks for creativity, among other mental wellness supplies.

Dr Kedar Tilwe

Yet another brand, The Thought Co, is run by a group of psychologists that offer mental health services. But in the last year, they began creating tools to help support therapy. “Our intent was to make mental healthcare fun. We are practising psychologists for the last 10 years and we felt that the mental health conversation needs to change. This is our way of reframing the way people look at mental health. So, we began creating products with colours that appealed to us, reader-friendly font, and ensured everything is well-designed,” says Priyanka Varma, founder and psychologist at The Thought Co. Varma adds that most products are inspired by therapy sessions and what they learn from clients. Each product is also multi-use, for example, the affirmation cards will have an affirmation and a journal prompt to encourage journaling and expression of feelings. 

But can such products over-simplify the conversation around mental health? “I think we should be aware that mental health in itself is a very dynamic construct fuelled by a biopsychosocial model with a lot of social factors at play, personal factors at play, variations which happen not only through days but through months also and through your previous experiences. So, while the conversation can get fuelled, it shouldn’t become that we are simplifying it so much that we lose perspective. That is why oversight is necessary and this should be something that we make people aware of,” says Dr Tilwe.

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