IMHA puts lived experience at heart of mental healthcare reform
The India Mental Health Alliance is championing the role of lived experience in shaping mental healthcare practice, service design and policy, with a focus on improving patient outcomes and reducing stigma.
This World Mental Health Day (10th October), the India Mental Health Alliance (IMHA), a network of 400 organisations from 30 Indian states, has reaffirmed its commitment to recognise lived experience as expertise, ensuring that the voices of people and vulnerable communities who have experienced mental health challenges are central to how care is designed and delivered.
IMHA was founded with the belief that mental health is a shared developmental priority for the nation, and building a strong system of care requires collective responsibility. Over the past two years, IMHA has engaged with 3,380 mental health professionals across more than 135 cities, and mobilised its member organisations to build collective capacity, enable knowledge-sharing, and embed lived experience expertise in care design and practice.
"These lived experiences offer an important source of knowledge about what mental healthcare looks like in practice i.e. how people experience services, navigate systems and seek support within their social and cultural contexts across India. IMHA believes that bringing clinical expertise together with lived and practice-based knowledge, is essential to building a mental health ecosystem that is more equitable, contextual and responsive to people's diverse needs," said Dr. Kavita Arora, child and adolescent psychiatrist and founding cohort member of IMHA.
Towards this commitment IMHA is building a co-curated and collaborative Knowledge Hub to make knowledge accessible from diverse sources and modalities, for practitioner insights, field lessons, clinical and lived experience expertise and academic research grounded in local contexts.
As part of its broader work to amplify and mainstream lived experience as expertise, IMHA proudly presents India's first anthology of lived-experience narratives by 11 women leaders from across sectors, 'Homecoming: Mental health journeys of resilience, healing and wholeness'.
This evocative book brings together first-person accounts of women in urban India navigating severe mental health conditions, including depression, complex PTSD, suicide loss, intergenerational trauma, anxiety and OCD. In sharing their journeys, they invite us to reflect on how families, communities, workplaces and healthcare professionals understand and respond to mental health conditions