 stories at the heart of my writing. Stories are the most precious and profound way to connect with each other and understand each other. My name is Priya Basil. I'm a writer and activist, and I'm the first international writer in residence on the Welcome Trust Minescapes program. And I'm invited to immerse myself in this vast subject of mental health and explore to follow my own intuitions in whatever direction they might take me. What I'm invited to reflect on is the possibility of writing something towards an atlas of mental health. And that sounds like a really huge task, but I find the idea of an atlas very intriguing because on the one hand, it purports to contain and represent the world or a very vast territory as if it is complete. And at the same time, I think the idea of an atlas offers the possibility to connect and bring things into one frame that maybe you wouldn't expect to find together. Economy, society, family, gender, sexuality. I think an atlas, it's very capacious and it allows all these different aspects to come into view. How am I supposed to reconcile this reality with what has happened to me? Yeah. A lot of people didn't come back. I feel so lucky to have been received with such warmth and generosity wherever I've gone. Complete strangers have opened up to me, spoken to me. So in Kenya, for example, I visited parts of the country, never been to, met people from different communities that I didn't even know of and have had a chance to get closer to this culture in ways that were not even imaginable for me when I was growing up and living here. Health also implies wellness and I think one of the wonderful things about exploring this terrain is to have those moments of just seeing how resourceful people are and how they find ways to manage in really challenging circumstances. So mental health is psychological disorders, psychological distress, and positive psychology. So I need to focus on the third concept. You're the first person who said the positive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The word mental carries so much history and baggage that's negative. I think that's probably one of the challenges of this project is how to destigmatise this word mental and maybe how to reappropriate it. I think what art does, what writing can do, is to offer us a different language through which to think about and experience the world. Talking to people, travelling, it has opened up so many stories, so many perspectives. What I would love is that if somehow through what I create, this sense of connection also is activated with my readers and that all these impressions together help to create this very layered and complex perspective on mental health.