The Story

After encountering a deeply personal loss of a friend to suicide owing to fear of not being placed during my undergraduate days, it made me think seriously about doing something in the emotional wellness space. Later on after noticing people around myself and my then colleague and now co-founder Puneet, we found so many unspoken issues surrounding job pressure, relationship issues, confidence issues, self-esteem issues, etc. affected almost everyone. Yet people were very hesitant to talk about all this with a professional owing to two main reasons: Stigma and Lack of awareness. The seeds of YourDOST were sown way back in 2010 when we applied to a social venture competition ISB iDiya which did not see fruition. However, we started speaking to a lot of people who had taken counseling as well as experts who provide counseling. We started capturing these experiences anonymously in a blog. This was the origin of YourDOST. We launched it as an emotional wellness platform in Dec. 2014 which provides access to experts (professional psychologists & coaches) and self-help tools (personality tests, learning modules, motivational stories, and psychoeducational content). With 1000+ experts on the platform, users can reach out to them 24x7 for guidance related to anxiety, relationships, career, academics, sexual wellness, self-improvement, and more. The key aspect of this product is that people are kept completely anonymous throughout the platform. Today, YourDOST has grown to become a holistic emotional wellness organisation working with corporates, educational institutions, incubators, and government agencies to help them take care of their communities’ emotional wellness. We work with them through awareness modules, self-help tools, 1on1 counseling intervention, and organisation level diagnostic and reporting.

Following are the challenges being addressed with a solution by YourDOST :

We partner with corporates and educational institutions to design and execute workplace wellness and student wellness programs respectively. We are now helping over 500+ such institutional clients build happier and more resilient communities. With a focus on enhancing happiness and resilience and also impacting the overall culture of organisations, we provide interventions at 3 levels - Individual Level (Self-Care) - Through YourDOST’s website/app, individuals get 24x7 instant to professional guidance from psychologists and coaches, assessments tools to help them understand themselves better, and self-help modules and training to develop skills to take care of themselves, face adversities with greater resilience and also provide support to those around them. Team Level (Peer-Support) - We conduct tailor-made training and programs for organisations’ leaders, managers, employees, staff members, students, etc. to help create and execute a peer support framework, and a supportive and caring team culture. Organisational Level (Workplace Culture) - We proactively work with organisations’ leadership through scientific analysis and data to help them understand and fill the gaps at an overall workplace level for building an empathetic and high-performing culture.

In the 8+ years since its inception, YourDOST has supported over 20 lakh+ lives in their most difficult time through effective counseling support. This includes almost 10,000 crises where lives have been saved. These consist of community members of 500+ educational institutions, corporate organisations and government departments. Among these are over 8,000 young migrant workers and health workers who received appropriate guidance wherein YourDOST Experts helped by understanding their real problems through counseling sessions to remain positive during COVID-19 induced lockdown and job loss. Also, in partnership with Haryana’s Department of Higher Education, YourDOST launched a free counseling helpline during the pandemic thus providing free support to more than 1,00,000 college students in the state Currently, YourDOST conducts 800+ one on one counseling sessions on a daily basis.