When Dr Vyshnavi Desiraju received blessings from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, it was not the beginning of her journey, but a quiet affirmation of work already underway. By then, she had spent several years working – largely behind the scenes – to build mental health support systems for healthcare professionals. The encounter reflected a direction she had long been pursuing: understanding who takes care of those who spend their lives caring for others.
Dr Vyshnavi is a medical professional and R&D consultant, currently based in Singapore, with her work spanning India and the wider Asia-Pacific region. She works at the intersection of medicine, research, and systems design, with a particular focus on healthcare worker wellbeing, trauma-informed care, and sustainable models of support within high-pressure institutions.
Across the world, healthcare professionals operate within systems that normalise exhaustion, emotional suppression, and silent suffering. Burnout is often treated as an individual weakness rather than a systemic failure. Dr Vyshnavi saw this not as an inevitable reality of medicine, but as a design flaw in how care itself is structured.
“Caretakers need care too – at home and beyond,” she reflects. “We cannot continue to build healthcare systems that depend on the quiet breakdown of those who sustain them.”
From medicine to meaningful systems
Trained as a medical professional, Dr Vyshnavi’s early career unfolded within the very ecosystem she would later seek to transform. She observed that conversations around mental health among doctors were frequently dismissed, postponed, or reframed as matters of personal resilience. Emotional distress was often considered part of the job description. Rather than accepting this as cultural inevitability, she began asking deeper questions. Why are healthcare workers expected to endure suffering in silence? Why is care reserved for patients, but rarely extended to providers? What would a healthcare system look like if wellbeing were treated as foundational rather than optional? These questions eventually led to the creation of Being.Lagom, a trauma-informed mental health ecosystem designed specifically for healthcare professionals. The name “Lagom,” inspired by a Swedish concept meaning “just enough,” reflects Dr Vyshnavi’s philosophy of sustainable balance – between service and self-preservation, ambition and rest, resilience and vulnerability.
Building a system, not just a programme
Being.Lagom is not a single intervention or awareness campaign. It is a layered architecture of support that creates safe spaces for healthcare professionals to process trauma, access peer-based mental health support, and rebuild a sense of community often lost in high-pressure medical environments.
Under Dr Vyshnavi’s leadership, the initiative has developed peer-led mental health models, therapist-facilitated group sessions, community-building rituals, and research-driven frameworks that address burnout at both individual and institutional levels.
What distinguishes her approach is its systems thinking. Rather than framing burnout as a personal failing, she treats it as a predictable outcome of misaligned incentives, cultural expectations, and biological limits.
“Medicine teaches us to diagnose symptoms,” she explains. “But burnout is not a symptom – it is a signal. It tells us something fundamental about how our systems are designed.”
A collective effort
Dr Vyshnavi to emphasizes that this work is not hers alone. Being.Lagom is powered by an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, researchers, designers, therapists, and volunteers who share a common conviction: sustainable healthcare is impossible without sustainable healers.
“One pair of hands can only do so much,” she says. “But when many hands come together with clarity and purpose, the impact multiplies.”
The initiative’s work has reached diverse healthcare communities – from academic institutions to crisis-response settings – offering models that can be adapted across geographies and cultural contexts.
Redefining success in healthcare
In an era driven by productivity metrics and performance outcomes, Dr Vyshnavi proposes a redefinition of success in medicine. For her, a successful healthcare system is not one that extracts maximum output from its professionals, but one that enables them to remain human.
She argues that emotional wellbeing is not a luxury or add-on, but a core infrastructure of healthcare. Without it, clinical excellence becomes unsustainable.
“Resilience should not mean endurance of harm,” she notes.
“It should mean having structures that prevent harm in the first place.”
Looking ahead
Today, Dr Vyshnavi continues to expand Being.Lagom with a long-term vision: a future where mental health support is embedded into the very design of healthcare institutions, rather than added as an afterthought.
Her work represents a quiet but significant shift – from treating burnout after it occurs to redesigning the conditions that produce it.
In a profession where suffering has long been normalised, Dr Vyshnavi Desiraju is asking a simple yet transformative question: What if caring for caregivers were not optional, but foundational?
And in doing so, she is not merely building programmes – she is reimagining what it means to care.
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