IIT Kharagpur turns to art therapy to ease stress after student suicides
Telegraph | 4 September 2025
IIT Kharagpur recently held an expressive art workshop last month to help students deal with stress, under the watch of a team of professional psychologists and certified expressive art therapists from a Mumbai-based health-tech company.
The workshop held from August 1 to 3 focused on stress management, emotional regulation, problem-solving and building trust.
IIT Kharagpur director Suman Chakraborty said that sessions on space visualisation, walking at varied pace and expressive art were held to encourage students to interact with each other, make new friends, work as a team and feel comfortable to share personal experiences in small groups.
“This workshop gave the participants an opportunity to express their inner feelings and emotions for the first time using art and movement. Some of them shared that they were under a lot of stress, having scored less in the exams recently. After attending this workshop, they felt relaxed, happy and calm. They also understood that acknowledging and accepting their emotions is the first step towards trying to manage stress or anxiety,” the director said.
The institute where four students were found hanging in their rooms in the past eight months is trying various methods to create a mechanism that could prevent deaths on the campus.
An IIT official said such sessions teach students about emotional release by engaging the mind, body and spirit creatively.
One of the students who was part of the session told Metro that it offered a “unique and powerful way to process feelings, gain self-awareness, and cultivate emotional resilience”.
The workshop included exercises called body drumming, which seeks to create a rhythm among the participants using their hands and legs, and balloon balancing in which the participants were asked to imagine the balloon to be their life and try to balance it with their body, assuming various ups and downs which are a part of daily living.
One of those who conducted the session said paced walking is considered an effective way to release stress and tension from the body by walking around the room with different intensities of emotions felt from within.
“In safe space visualisation, the students are told to visualise a place where they feel most secure, safe and relaxed, imagine those people with them in that space whose presence made them feel good. Expressive through art was about drawing that safe place on a paper and filling it with colours, releasing so many emotions,” a professional psychologist said.
This year, the IIT conducted an induction programme for parents of new students and asked them not to expose their children to “artificial pressure on internships or placements”.
Induction programmes so far were held only for students.
Director Chakraborty said: “We have decided to engage with the parents periodically so we can keep reminding them gently about the things they should steer clear of. All the models are being attempted so we can prevent loss of lives on the campus.”
On July 27, a division bench of the Supreme Court expressed its concerns over the loss of lives on the campus.
“What is wrong with IIT KGP? Why are students committing suicide? Have you given a thought to it?” the division bench said.
The institute has appointed a full-time psychiatrist as part of the mental-health outreach. It is awaiting recommendations from a panel of external experts on what could be done to stop the spate of deaths.