When Silence Becomes a Movement: Meet the Teen Behind Thailand's Most Followed Mental Health Platform

 

Smith Thamakaison and his siblings turned their own struggles with adolescent depression into Crying Cloud – a youth-led movement that has reached millions across Asia.
 

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a family when everyone is hurting but no one speaks about it. For Smith Thamakaison and his two sisters, Sasin and Sirin, that silence was the beginning of everything.

 

The three siblings grew up navigating adolescent depression without ever fully acknowledging it — not to each other, and certainly not beyond the family walls. In Thailand, that quiet was not unusual. It was simply the unspoken expectation. 

 

But in 2022, from their home in Bangkok and as students at the International School Bangkok (ISB), the three co-founded Crying Cloud, a youth-led social enterprise aimed at making mental health support more accessible and affordable for young people across Thailand and beyond. Smith was 16 at the time.

 

Today, the platform has a community of over 125,000 followers on Instagram, has organically reached more than 30 million people across five countries, and has connected over 7,000 young people to affordable — and often free — therapy. The numbers are striking. The story behind them is more so.
 

 

 

Saying the Things Nobody Said

Crying Cloud did not begin with a business plan or a brand strategy. It began with an Instagram page — the platform, as Smith puts it, most native to his generation. The content was deliberately simple and slightly imperfect.

 

"We were trying to say the things that nobody had said to us when we needed to hear them most," Smith explains. "Most mental health content we encountered at the time either explained depression at us, like a pamphlet, or dramatised it in a way that felt more like a spectacle. Neither felt like company."
 

 

 

 

 

The visual language followed suit: human, approachable, and free of the clinical gloss that tends to push young audiences away.

 

The goal was for someone scrolling at their worst moment to feel as though they had stumbled upon a friend who understood them, not a service trying to fix them. The instinct proved right. Their earliest posts reached around 85 likes. Their most widely shared post eventually reached 1.9 million.

 

 

 

A Message That Changed Everything

The pivot from content platform to active support network came through a single message. Early in the life of the Instagram page, a young woman from a rural province outside Bangkok contacted the team. 

 

She had been waiting three months for a therapy appointment and had just been told the next available slot was two months further away — five months in total before she could speak to a professional even once.

 

She was not asking them to solve it. She was asking if they knew anywhere she could turn.

 

"At the same time, we didn't have a good answer," Smith recalls. "That was the realisation that the gap we had assumed existed was, in fact, much larger and much more painful than we had imagined, and that nobody was coming to close it on any timeline that mattered to the people already inside it."

 

 

They began building a volunteer psychologist network that same week. It has since grown to include over 100 volunteer psychologists and psychiatrists who have collectively delivered more than 5,000 hours of care. 

 

The initiative was recognised as the top project among 157 teams at Thailand's Prime Minister's Health Innovation Award in 2022 — a significant validation for a team of teenagers operating without institutional backing.

 

 

 

"Before the award, certain conversations with officials would arrive at a point where you could sense them deciding whether we were serious," Smith says. "The award clarified a lot of that."

 

 

 

Art as Entry Point

The siblings did not stop at therapy access. They have since developed WithU, a mental health education app created in collaboration with developer Tyme Suteesopon and dozens of Thai artists.

 

The app is designed to spread positivity and enhance mental health through heartwarming quotes and beautiful artwork created by talented local artists in Thailand. 

 

It reached number two in the Medical category on Thailand's App Store, was featured at Apple's WWDC 2023, and was later spotlighted by Apple as part of its "Here's To The Dreamers" initiative — a campaign honouring innovators across Southeast Asia.

 

The choice to weave art into mental health education was deliberate. 

 

"Art allows people to connect emotionally before they have to process things intellectually," Smith says. "Information can tell you that depression is a diagnosable condition. Art can make you feel, for a brief moment, that another person has stood exactly where you are standing and found their way through. That feeling is what actually moves someone toward help."

 

Five of Crying Cloud's resources have also been broadcast nationwide on Thai government channels — a rare endorsement for a youth-led initiative and a signal, perhaps, that something in the broader culture is beginning to shift.

 

 

 

The Weight of Both Worlds

Running a social enterprise that supports thousands of people whilst sitting A-levels would strain most adults. Smith is candid about the difficulty. There are moments, he says, when a school deadline and a crisis at Crying Cloud collide, and you simply have to make peace with the fact that you cannot do either perfectly.

 

"What helps most is having a strong team and a clear structure so that everything does not depend on one person," he says. "There are times when school needs to come first, and other times when I can focus more on the project. It is not perfect, but being intentional with time makes a big difference."

 

It is a balance that reflects the broader reality of youth-led work: meaningful impact rarely arrives with convenient timing.

 

 

Looking Towards Southeast Asia

As Crying Cloud sets its sights on expansion across Thailand and eventually the wider Southeast Asian region, Smith is clear-eyed about the cultural headwinds.

 

Across much of the region, he says, seeking therapy is still widely perceived as a sign of weakness, emotional struggles are expected to remain within the family, and the cost of professional support places it well beyond the reach of many young people.

 

"A big part of our work is showing that support can be made more affordable, and that there are ways to build systems that feel both culturally relevant and approachable," he says.

 

 

 

In Thailand, addressing mental health has become a key national issue, with the government declaring May as "Mind Month", a campaign aimed at raising awareness and reducing stigma. The urgency is real. Crying Cloud is not waiting for the conversation to catch up.

 

For other young Thais who see a problem in their community and wonder whether they are too young to address it, Smith's advice is as direct as the content that made Crying Cloud what it is today: "Start with what you have, even if it feels small or incomplete. In many cases, being young gives you a clearer and more honest understanding of the problem, especially if it directly affects your generation."

 

He pauses, then adds something that sounds less like advice and more like lived experience: "Consistency is what makes the difference. When results do not come quickly, many people stop before they have given their idea enough time to grow."

 

Crying Cloud never stopped. And for more than 7,000 young people across Asia who found help when the system could not offer it fast enough, that persistence has made all the difference.