When Neha Kirpal looks back on her childhood, one memory returns with startling clarity.

She was about five or six when her mother told her, “Don’t brush your teeth because I think the toothpaste is poisoned. I think your father is trying to poison us.”

At that age, Neha did not know the language of mental health. Most five-year-olds are still learning words for the world around them, not trying to make sense of why a parent has suddenly become frighteningly unpredictable. She did not know why her mother would say such terrifying things, or why an invisible fear seemed to have settled over their home.

For Neha, this was simply life as it was lived. It would take many years before she understood that her family had been living inside an illness that affects millions of people in India and that the confusion of those early days would influence the woman she would eventually become.

“One just knew it as how one was experiencing life day to day,” she says.

As a teenager, she would learn that her mother was living with schizophrenia — a severe mental illness that can distort how a person perceives reality, sometimes creating intense paranoia or deeply held delusional beliefs.

What followed were years of chaos that would affect every part of her growing up: conflict between her parents, accusations that blurred reality and delusion, neighbours overhearing the fights, police arriving at the door, and a home where safety could vanish without warning.

“For the first three-four years, essentially our definition of mental health and illness was a family at war with itself, but behind closed doors.”

Those closed doors, however, did not hold forever.

“The sounds leaked out. My brother would hide under the dining table, and I would throw myself in the middle of a fight.”

At the time, in the 1980s, the family itself did not fully understand what they were dealing with. Conversations about mental illness were rare, and schizophrenia was barely discussed in public. What Neha remembers most is not diagnoses or treatment plans, but the sense that reality inside the house kept shifting in ways she could not explain.

Decades later, those early memories would shape the work she would go on to do — helping transform how India understands and responds to mental health.

But at the time, she was simply a child trying to survive in her own home.

The child who learnt to disappear

Through her school years, Neha built a parallel life outside the house — one that looked almost perfectly normal.

“We slept with furniture pushed against the door because my mother believed someone might come to kill us. Stuff like that was sort of what everyday childhood was. And then one just got up and went to school and pretended like it’s a normal day.”

If home was a battlefield, school became her stage for normalcy. She attempted to excel academically and immersed herself in competitive sports such as badminton and hockey.

What looked like discipline from the outside was, in many ways, survival.

“I just ran ten hours a day. That actually saved my life, I would say.”

Looking back, she recognises what she was doing instinctively.

“There was a lot of dissociation.........

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