Benny is a psychological researcher, global mental health advocate, and mindfulness and compassion trainer. He currently serves as South East Asia Regional Lead in the Global Mental Health Peer Network. He founded Into The Light Indonesia (Yayasan Insan Teman Langit), a youth based suicide prevention community in 2013.

He also is involved in several international collaborative research and programs aimed at reducing suicide stigma and building community members’ capacity for suicide prevention.

Benny started his suicide prevention work as he found very little information about suicide prevention in Bahasa Indonesia, and he also was disturbed about the way Indonesian online news outlets sensationalized and stigmatized suicide news.

Those experiences motivated him to work with allies and the National Press Council on developing Indonesian suicide news reporting guideline, which was published in 2019. Benny is particularly interested in meeting the needs of marginalized groups, who tend to have higher rates of suicide and self-harm ideation, yet often lack access to mental health services.

He hopes the Equity Initiative will help him find ways to develop compassionate mental health care within Indonesia’s health system so that it will become more accessible and inclusive to marginalized groups.