Rekha (name changed) hardship started early. After losing both her parents young, she was raised by an uncle and aunt but instead of the love and care a child needs, she faced rejection and mistreatment in their home. At sixteen, she found comfort with a young man who understood her pain because he had experienced pain too. They fell in love and built a life together. But he was struggling with substance use, and in trying to hold onto him, Rekha found herself drawn into using drugs too.

            Neither of them had citizenship documents. Without that single piece of paper, doors kept closing. No legal identity, no steady work, no way out of the cycle they were trapped in.

            Her husband was jailed repeatedly for theft, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, and each time, Rekha was left to survive alone shuttling between courts and jails, waiting.

            Eventually, with her husband detained again and nowhere left to turn, she found herself sleeping in a friend's room with no food and no way to cook. Some nights she went to bed hungry. The pain of her childhood, her losses, and the shame placed on her by society became too much to bear pushing her to a devastating thought that it might be easier not to wake up at all.

            It was a routine screening by a peer counsellor that uncovered how serious things had become. She was taken straight to a hospital's psychiatric department and started medication. But even then, the real barrier wasn't the treatment. It was survival. Fifteen days of medicine cost only Rs. 260, but Rekha didn't even have that. When the medicine was given to her anyway, she still refused to take it on an empty stomach saying "There's no food to eat, how can I take this?"

            Moved by her situation, her counsellor paid for the medicine personally, and connected her with another organization for food support. Only once she had something to eat, did she finally begin her treatment. Since then, small signs of change have started to appear. Her anxious, negative thinking has begun to ease. She has stopped seeing her lack of citizenship as a wall she cannot get past, and has started looking for work; any work to build a life that doesn't depend entirely on her husband.

            Rekha's story is a reminder that adherence to treatment was never really about willpower. For her, it was about whether there was food on the table that day.