Third Year Depression at IIT Delhi — Nobody Talks About This

I am going to be direct because I spent a long time not being direct about this and I think that was part of the problem. In the second semester of my third year at IIT Delhi, I stopped attending classes for two weeks. Not because I was lazy. Not because I was partying. Because getting out of bed felt like climbing a wall I could not see the top of, and after a few days of not going, the thought of going back became its own additional wall.

I am writing this because I have had three juniors message me in the past year describing almost exactly what I went through and not knowing what to call it or who to tell. So here is what I wish someone had written down for me.

What It Actually Felt Like

People have this image of depression as sadness. It was not mostly sadness for me. It was flatness. I would sit in my room and scroll through my phone without registering what I was reading. I would order food from Swiggy and forget to eat it. My code stopped making sense to me, not because I had forgotten anything, but because I could not find the energy to care whether it worked or not. That last part scared me the most. I had always cared about code.

The isolation made it worse in the specific way that only hostel isolation can. My room was surrounded by people — there were twenty guys on my floor — and somehow that made the aloneness more total. I could hear everyone laughing at something through the wall and feel entirely disconnected from the possibility of laughing at anything.

What Did Not Help

Forcing myself to just show up to class made it worse for about two days before I stopped doing that. Telling myself other people had it harder made it worse. Reading productivity articles made it significantly worse. The IIT counselling helpline number was printed on my student ID card and I did not call it for three weeks because I did not think what I was experiencing was serious enough to warrant a call. That was also a mistake.

What Actually Helped

I eventually told one person: my roommate Sahil. I did not frame it as depression. I just told him I was struggling and I did not know why. He did not try to fix it, which was the right move. He just started including me in small things — going to the mess, watching something on his laptop. Having a reason to leave the room that was just about company, not productivity, mattered more than I expected.

I also eventually called the counselling number. The counsellor I spoke to did not tell me anything revolutionary. She helped me understand that what I was experiencing had a name and a shape, and that the shape was not permanent. That alone was genuinely useful. She also helped me figure out which courses I needed to formally request extensions for, which took a practical problem off my plate.

Exercise was the other thing. I started walking at 6 AM, not as a wellness practice but because it was the one time of day when the campus was quiet and I did not have to perform being fine. After about ten days of walking I started feeling slightly less flat. It was not a cure. It was a foothold.

What I Want You to Know

Third year is genuinely the hardest year at most IITs. The coursework peaks, placements loom, and you are simultaneously expected to have figured out your career direction, your research interests, and whether you want to do an MBA or not. The pressure is real and it lands on everyone differently. If you are in a place that looks like what I described, please tell one person. It does not have to be a formal call. It does not have to be the counsellor. It just has to be one person who knows.