India Mental Health Alliance highlights personal experience in care design

UPDATE - follow-up to India Mental Health Alliance (IMHA) champions lived experience as central to shaping mental healthcare practice, service design and policy: The India Mental Health Alliance reaffirms its commitment to placing lived experience at the center of mental healthcare practice, service design, and policy across the country.

Expert Views

Dr. Kavita Arora, who works as a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and serves as a Founding Cohort Member of IMHA, states that personal experiences offer vital knowledge on how people use services and seek support within their social and cultural contexts. The network brings together clinical expertise with practice-based knowledge to build a fair and responsive mental health system.

New Initiatives

To support this goal, IMHA is building a collaborative Knowledge Hub to share practitioner insights, field lessons, and academic research. The alliance has also published an anthology titled 'Homecoming: Mental Health Journeys of Resilience, Healing & Wholeness'. This book features first-person accounts from 11 women leaders in urban India dealing with conditions such as depression, complex PTSD, suicide loss, intergenerational trauma, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Context

The India Mental Health Alliance operates as a network of 400 organizations spanning 30 Indian states, bringing together groups focused on health, gender, livelihood, climate, and education. World Mental Health Day is observed globally on October 10 to raise awareness and mobilize support for mental health programs.