Harassment Didn’t Kill Him. The Silence After Did.
From a TCS desk in Pune to the wreckage in Ahmedabad, we keep blaming the blow. The real killer is the same every time , there was no one, and nothing, built to catch the fall. This is the gap I started Solh to close.
On the morning of June 2, a 48-year-old engineer named Amit Brahme was found dead at his home in Pune. He had given Tata Consultancy Services the better part of his adult life. He left behind a two-page note. In it, he named three colleagues. He wrote about projects quietly stripped from him, about being handed work designed to make him fail, about being humiliated in front of his team, about false complaints filed by a man he had called a friend. The police have registered a case of abetment to suicide. The union is asking the Chief Minister hard questions. And the headline writes itself: workplace harassment killed a TCS engineer.
I want to be very careful here, because a man is dead and a family is shattered, so let me say the obvious first. If those allegations are true, what was done to him was cruel, it was wrong, and the people responsible must answer for it. Workplace harassment is real. It must be punished. None of what follows is a defence of anyone who made his days a misery.
But I am going to say something that the easy headline does not want said: the harassment is not the reason he is gone.
Workplace Harassment Is Not a New Problem
Office politics did not get invented in 2026. Bosses have humiliated juniors since the first boss and the first junior. Good people have had their work stolen, their reputations knifed, their careers sabotaged by someone they trusted , in every decade, in every industry, in every country. Pressure, cruelty, betrayal, the slow grind of a job that has turned hostile: none of this is new. Our parents endured versions of it. Their parents did too.
So if the cruelty is not new, why does it feel like the funerals are? Why does it feel like every few weeks there is another young name, another note, another campus, another “died by suicide”?
Because the thing that changed is not the pain. The thing that changed is what happens to a human being while they are in pain.
This isn’t the first time I’ve found myself asking these questions. In my earlier piece on workplace culture lessons from TCS Nashik, I explored how headlines often focus on the incident itself while missing the deeper institutional signals that went unnoticed long before the crisis became public.
Workplace Mental Health and the Collapse of Support Structures
A generation ago, when life caved in on someone, there was a scaffolding around them that nobody designed and everybody relied on. The joint family. The neighbour who noticed the lights on at 3am. The colleague who pulled you aside for chai and asked, plainly, “what’s wrong with you these days?” The friend you could call without it being a whole production. It was messy and imperfect, but it was always-on, and it was free, and it caught people , quietly, a thousand times a day , before they reached the edge.
That scaffolding has been quietly dismantled. We moved to cities away from family. We replaced neighbours with WhatsApp groups. We turned colleagues into competitors. We made “I’m fine” the only socially acceptable answer to “how are you.” We got 900 followers and zero people we could call at midnight. And so today, when the same old cruelty lands on someone, it lands on a person standing completely alone , with no scaffolding left to catch them.
That is the actual cause. Not the harassment. The isolation around the harassment. Not the blow. The absence of anyone there when it landed.
The Three Drivers of a Workplace Mental Health Crisis
When I look at story after story, the pattern is brutally consistent. It is never really one villain and one victim. It is three failures stacked on top of each other:
- Lack of mental health support , there was no system, formal or human, that the person could reach and actually be held by. A helpline number on a poster is not support. An annual “wellness webinar” is not support. Support is someone, or something, that stays.
- Workplace isolation , the person suffered in a sealed room. Everyone around them saw a competent, functioning adult, because that is the mask we have all agreed to wear. Nobody knew the inside.
- Not knowing how to deal with a mental health crisis , this is the cruellest one. Most people in crisis have never been taught a single tool for what to do when the mind turns on itself. They don’t know it’s an illness, not a weakness. They don’t know it passes. They don’t know that the unbearable feeling at 2am is a wave, not a verdict.
Remove any one of those three and Amit Brahme is very likely still alive, harassment and all. That is not a comforting thought. It is meant to be a clarifying one.
Workplace Trauma, Isolation and the Need for Mental Health Support
Here is where people will tell me I’ve gone too far, so stay with me. The suicide of an IT engineer and the Ahmedabad plane crash look like they belong in completely different conversations. One is a private despair. The other is a public catastrophe that took dozens in seconds and left a city in grief.
They are the same story.
In both, life delivers a blow no human was built to absorb alone. And in both, look at what is waiting on the other side of the blow: almost nothing. The survivor who walked away from that wreckage , who is holding them through the months of nightmares to come? The family that got the call? The first responders who pulled bodies out and went home to dinner as if it were a normal Tuesday? The colleagues who sat ten feet from a man and never saw him drowning? In every single case, the same gap. The event ends and the support that should begin… doesn’t exist. People are left to “be strong,” to “move on,” to carry trauma with their bare hands.
We have built a society that is brilliant at producing shock and utterly unequipped to metabolise it. The deterioration of the support structure is not a workplace problem or a TCS problem. It is everyone’s problem, all the time , it just stays invisible until a name and a photograph force us to look.
Why Employee Mental Health Support Cannot Be a Point Solution
And this, finally, is where I get angry as a builder. Because the market’s answer to a collapsing support structure has been to sell people , you guessed it , points. A meditation app here. A therapy-booking site there. A corporate EAP that nobody uses because using it means admitting weakness to HR. A helpline you call once, in the worst moment of your life, and then never again.
Every one of those is a single brick handed to a person who needs a building. A point solution shows up for one moment and then leaves. But despair is not a moment. Isolation is not an event. The 2am wave comes back. The grief after Ahmedabad does not resolve in one therapy session. Support that is not continuous is not support , it is a photo-op.
I’ve written previously about why most mental health startups fail, and the answer is remarkably similar: people don’t need disconnected interventions. They need systems that remain present before, during, and after the difficult moments.
Building Employee Support Systems Through Solh
I didn’t start Solh to sell another brick. I started it because I watched the scaffolding come down and decided to build a new one , deliberately, for everyone, and on purpose.
Solh is not a point solution. It is a workplace mental health ecosystem that tags along.
That phrase matters to me, so let me be precise about it. “Comprehensive” means the whole journey is covered , the bad night, the long recovery, the daily maintenance, the moment of crisis, and every ordinary day in between. Self-help when you can do it alone. Peer support when you need to hear “me too.” Professionals when it has to be a professional. Tools that teach you how to deal with it, so the next wave finds you less defenceless than the last one. “Tags along” means it doesn’t wait for you to hit rock bottom and dial a number. It stays with you. It is the always-on scaffolding the joint family and the watchful neighbour used to be , rebuilt for a generation that lives in different cities from everyone who loves them.
And here is the part I will not apologise for: I intend to make tons of money doing this. 🙂 Not because the money is the point, but because a support structure that depends on charity dies the moment the grant runs out. The old scaffolding collapsed partly because it was nobody’s job. I want this one to be unkillable , and the only support structure that becomes unkillable is one that is also a great business. Doing enormous good and building an enormous company are not in tension here. They are the same plan.
Rebuilding Support Systems to Prevent the Next Mental Health Crisis
You don’t need to wait for me, or for Solh, to start rebuilding the scaffolding around the people near you. Three things, starting today:
→ Be a structure, not a sympathy card. Don’t say “reach out if you ever need anything.” Nobody reaches out. You reach in. Pick one person who has gone quiet and check on them on a schedule, not on a whim.
→ Break your own isolation first. The mask is contagious. The moment one person says “honestly, I’m not okay this week,” they give everyone around them permission to be human. Be that person.
→ Learn the tools, and teach them. Know that crisis is a wave, not a verdict. Know the numbers to call. Know what to say to someone on the edge (hint: not “think of your family” , just “I’m here, and I’m not leaving”). This is learnable. Go learn it.
Amit Brahme should not be a hashtag. Neither should the people we lost in Ahmedabad. They should be the reason we finally admit the uncomfortable truth: the cruelty was never the thing that killed them. The emptiness around the cruelty was. We can keep writing outraged headlines about the blow , or we can rebuild the thing that’s supposed to catch the fall.
I know which one I’m spending my life on.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is workplace harassment, and how does it affect mental health?
Workplace harassment includes repeated behaviors such as humiliation, intimidation, exclusion, bullying, discrimination, or actions designed to undermine an employee’s confidence and performance. Over time, workplace harassment can contribute to stress, anxiety, depression, burnout, and other serious workplace mental health challenges.
Why do some employees struggle more with workplace harassment than others?
People respond differently to difficult situations based on their support systems, coping skills, personal circumstances, and mental health history. Workplace harassment is harmful to anyone, but the impact can become significantly worse when an employee is isolated or lacks access to meaningful mental health support.
How does workplace isolation contribute to mental health crises?
Workplace isolation occurs when employees feel disconnected from colleagues, friends, family, or support networks. Isolation can make stress feel overwhelming because people have fewer opportunities to share their experiences, seek advice, or receive emotional support during difficult periods.
What are the warning signs that someone may be experiencing a mental health crisis at work?
Common warning signs include sudden withdrawal from colleagues, noticeable changes in behavior, persistent exhaustion, declining performance, loss of interest in activities, expressions of hopelessness, increased irritability, or talking about feeling trapped. Recognizing these signs early can help people access support before a crisis escalates.
What can organizations do to improve employee mental health and employee wellbeing?
Organizations can improve employee wellbeing by creating psychologically safe workplaces, addressing workplace harassment promptly, training managers to recognize distress, encouraging open conversations about mental health, providing access to professional support, and building employee support systems that extend beyond one-time wellness initiatives.
