India Mental Health Alliance Puts Lived Experience at the Core of Care Design on World Mental Health Day

On World Mental Health Day, the India Mental Health Alliance (IMHA) reaffirmed its pledge to centre lived experience in the design and delivery of mental health services across India. IMHA, a cross‑sectoral network of 400 organisations operating in 30 states, said the voices of people who have faced mental health challenges will guide future care. "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. She added that combining clinical expertise with practice‑based insight is vital for an equitable, responsive ecosystem. To operationalise this, IMHA is creating a co‑curated Knowledge Hub that will gather practitioner insights, field lessons, clinical and lived‑experience expertise, and locally grounded research. As part of its effort, IMHA launched India’s first anthology of lived‑experience narratives, "Homecoming: Mental Health Journeys of Resilience, Healing & Wholeness," featuring first‑person stories from 11 women leaders about depression, complex PTSD, suicide loss, intergenerational trauma, anxiety and OCD. The book is accompanied by a short film that illustrates these journeys. IMHA, a Section 8 not‑for‑profit founded in late 2023 through a partnership between Vasvi, Ashish Bharat Ram, Amaha Health and Children First, aims to mainstream mental health as a national development priority, improve care quality, embed Lived Experience Expertise (LEE) in service design, and attract long‑term unrestricted capital for the sector. ## Context The alliance’s focus on lived experience reflects a growing global consensus that people with direct mental‑health experience can improve service relevance and effectiveness, especially in diverse cultural settings like India.