Your Sugar Daddy — Busting mental stigmas one puppy at a time

It was a scene in the Bollywood film 3 Idiots that drew Angel D’Souza to the subject of mental health. In the 2009 film, an engineering student dies by suicide after his professor fails him. In the moments leading up to his death, the student is seen in distress despite the best efforts of his friends to make him smile or forget about his score.

D’Souza was barely 8 or 9 back then. “As a child, I didn’t understand the concept of death,” the 20-year-old from the northern Indian city of Mohali said. “All I knew was that if I had been there, I’d have talked to him. I’d have helped him out,” she added. 

On November 23, as D’Souza launched a cafe dedicated to mental health, she felt like her life had come full circle. “I always knew I wanted to start some kind of helpline for people who are lonely, sad, or have nobody to talk to. I want to normalise talking about mental health. There’s still so much stigma around it,” she said. 

Cheekily called Your Sugar Daddy, the cafe serves food of all kinds, from American diner-style offerings to Korean and Indian dishes. The name came from her own love for baking, but with a purposefully cheeky edge to it. “Most of the names of cafes are so normal, so cliché. I wanted something unique, even if it’s a bit edgy. It catches people’s attention,” she said. 

D’Souza’s initiative might just be a drop in this dark, murky ocean. “But it’s a start,” she said. 

Her project, in fact, was spurred in part by the pandemic last year, during which she faced mental health issues herself, but found healing in cooking and serving people during multiple lockdowns. 

“Ever since I was little, I’ve always wanted to listen to people’s problems. So in the cafe, I’ve introduced small mental health concepts, like I play a game with my customers where they look at cards printed with optical illusions. I then help them interpret what they saw, and why they saw it,” she said. She ran a delivery kitchen for a year and a half before opening the cafe. 

There are also puppies in the cafe, she said, because puppies are therapeutic, of course. She also organises motivational talks and art therapy sessions. 

“Many people assume that when we say mental health, it means ‘crazy.’ “While my parents are very supportive, some family friends said they wouldn’t come to a place like this, and that mental health is too heavy a word, or will be perceived with stigma,” she said.  

But a lot of young folks like her have been very supportive, she says. They send her messages on Instagram about having played her games and tried her food. “I just want to destroy taboos around mental health, you know. It’s as simple as that,” she said.

The cafe is steadily gaining a following. “I’d say that this place is an experiment. I think it’s going to work out,” said D’Souza. 

Source: Agencies