India Mental Health Alliance Puts Lived Experience at Heart of Care on World Mental Health Day

India Mental Health Alliance (IMHA) reaffirmed on World Mental Health Day its pledge to place the lived experience of mental‑health patients at the core of service design and policy. The cross‑sectoral network, which brings together 400 organisations from 30 states, says the move is meant to ensure that voices of people and vulnerable communities shape how care is delivered. Founded in late 2023 as a Section 8 non‑profit partnership between Vasvi, Ashish Bharat Ram, Amaha Health and Children First, IMHA views mental health as a national development priority. In the two years since its launch, it has engaged 3,380 mental‑health professionals in more than 135 cities, mobilising members to share knowledge and embed lived‑experience expertise in practice. “These lived experiences offer an important source of knowledge about what mental healthcare looks like in practice…,” said Dr Kavita Arora, child and adolescent psychiatrist and founding cohort member of IMHA. To operationalise the pledge, IMHA is creating a co‑curated Knowledge Hub that will collect practitioner insights, field lessons, clinical and lived‑experience evidence and locally‑grounded research. The alliance also released ‘Homecoming: Mental Health Journeys of Resilience, Healing & Wholeness’, India’s first anthology of narratives from 11 women leaders who describe coping with severe conditions such as depression, complex PTSD, suicide loss, intergenerational trauma, anxiety and OCD. The book and an accompanying short film aim to prompt families, workplaces and professionals to rethink their response to mental‑health challenges.

Context

Embedding lived‑experience expertise is increasingly seen as a way to make mental‑health services more equitable and culturally relevant across India’s diverse population.