Mental Health: The Rural Quandary
VIEW EVENT DETAILSWednesday, 19 February, 6:00pm

Mahatma Gandhi wrote in Harijan, in 1936, that India is to be found in its villages. Today, that still holds true: over 64% of the country lives in its rural areas. While the Mental Healthcare Act of 2017 has set up provisions for mental health at the state level, and existing national government legislation provides for mental healthcare capacity at the district level, the reality presents many challenges. Chief among these is that the psychiatrist, psychologist and counsellor posts at the primary health centre and hospital level are often vacant. India has 0.3 psychiatrists per 100,000 people. Kerala, for example, has 0.63 clinical psychologists per lakh population, and Tamil Nadu has 10.5 nurses per lakh poplulation. Even though every state in India has mental health training programs, they cover less than 50% of the districts in each state. Even if a hospital or health centre was well-staffed, access might be challenging, given the vast distances and few transportation options in rural India.
In addition to infrastructural constraints like this, mental healthcare is affected by the stigma that those seeking care face. Those suffering the most might feel caution to admit they need medical help. The difficulty of life in rural India for those engaged in agricultural work (India’s largest occupation by percentage), including an unreliable monsoon, low market prices for their goods, and the cyclical nature of poverty and debt leading to farmer suicides, are another complicating factor. Mental healthcare professionals have over the years evolved many innovative methods to address this question: including community-based healthcare, and participatory mental healthcare, both of which draw on rural communities’ ideas, suggestions for their own care, and recommendations on the efficacy and localisation of treatment methods.
Given the scale of the problem, in this conversation, we hope to draw attention to the availability and infrastructure of mental healthcare in rural India, explore some solutions which have worked to mitigate mental distress, and identify some anecdotes and experiences that might illuminate how mental healthcare can be made more effective, locally specific, and universally accessible. What is the current state of mental healthcare in rural areas in India? What are the specific barriers preventing rural India from accessing mental healthcare? What are some interventions that have shown success in the past, and how can we create more inclusive and accessible health systems?
This program is supported by the Raika Godrej Family Trust.
SPEAKERS

Aishwarya Mohanty is an award-winning freelance journalist and researcher specializing in gender, environment, rural issues, and social justice. She has contributed to notable platforms such as Mongabay, The Migration Story, Indiaspend, Down to Earth, Frontline, and Indian Express, among others. Aishwarya has reported extensively across Gujarat and Odisha, focusing on underreported stories and vulnerable communities. Her accolades include the Laadli PF Media Award for Gender-Sensitive Reporting and the ICRC-PII Annual Award for Best Article. Aishwarya has been awarded prestigious fellowships, including the South Asian Women in Media Fellowship, Earth Journalism Network Fellowship, and the Environmental Data Journalism Academy, for her investigative and impactful storytelling. Currently, she leads communications at the National Coalition for Natural Farming and is also the co-founder of Roots to Routes Natural Farms, where she and her partner are dedicated to practicing sustainable, chemical-free natural farming.

Jasmine Kalha is a Program Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Mental Health Law & Policy, ILS, Pune. Trained in Social Work and Sociology, she has worked on innovative, evidence-based implementation research interventions at-scale on mental health and human rights in low resource settings. She co-leads the scale-up, evaluation and implementation of Atmiyata, a community-led intervention to enable access to mental health and social care. The intervention uses a stepped care model using community volunteers. At present, the intervention covers approximately 3.5 million rural adult population across seven districts in India. Previously, she has worked on peer support, recovery, and health systems reform through WHO’s QualityRights framework.

Dr. KV Kishore Kumar trained as a psychiatrist in NIMHANS Bangalore and worked in community psychiatry for 30 years. He is currently the director of the Banyan, India. His areas of interest include community models for mental health care, health promotion using a life skills approach, initiation of community-based detox progrmmes, and stress management for lawmakers and lastly training of all categories of mental health workers integrate mental health care into general health care.
Dr. Kishore Kumar was associated with disaster mental health work from the year 2000. He was responsible for developing information manuals for community level workers, teachers and general practitioners. He was also responsible for the development of several self-instructional manuals to strengthen decentralized mental health care such as the operational manual for the District Mental Health Programme (DMHP), workbooks for medical officers and program officers who were involved in implementation of DMHP. He also developed workbooks for school teachers and trainers in life skills education. One of the most significant contributions has been to develop life skills manual for teachers for health promotion of adolescents. These manuals are used extensively around the country. He is a faculty member at The Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health (BALM). He has been an advisor to several governments in the country on mental health care, disaster metal health and life skills education. He was a member of India’s first national mental health policy.
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