Syllabus: Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.
Lived Experiences and Nature of Suffering
- Personal narratives reveal deep emotional pain that numerical data rarely communicate.
- Individuals display varied responses to distress shaped by context, history and belief systems.
- Ignoring these narratives minimizes discourse on barriers, attitudes and inadequate care systems.
- Harmful experiences, including childhood neglect and abusive psychiatric practices, highlight systemic failures.
Problems with Dominant Approaches
- Psychosocial disability is often framed through a deficit lens, focusing on forced community integration.
- Such approaches promote narrow notions of “normalcy” and productivity, leaving social structures unquestioned.
- Global mental health-care gaps remain extremely high, ranging between 70%–90%.
- Despite new medicines and therapies, core issues surrounding dignity and justice remain unresolved.
Reimagining Mental Health Care
- Authors argue for mental health care centred on dignity, equity and disability justice.
- Care must accompany individuals through relational, material and structural suffering.
- It involves supporting meaning-making, responding to adverse events and meeting needs for safety and relationships.
- Real solutions require asking what societal conditions create such suffering and how personalisation can scale.
Intersections of Distress and Social Context
- Material and relational deprivation often remains unaddressed, worsening mental ill-health.
- NCRB data show one-third suicides linked to family issues and one-tenth to relational ruptures.
- Distress is influenced by biological, psychological, social, cultural, political and historical factors.
- These elements intersect with caste, class, gender and queer identities, shaping both suffering and access to care.
Rethinking Care Practices
- People in crisis require space to explore existential uncertainties and emotional pain.
- Biological and social determinant models often suppress these deeper dimensions of well-being.
- Tangible support like housing or income cannot substitute connection and meaning.
- Care must include relational work, addressing vulnerabilities, purpose and coherence within social-ecological contexts.
Towards Relational Justice
- Transforming care requires solidarity, dialogic practice and recognition of non-linear outcomes.
- Justice involves asking whether systems centre dignity and address root injustices causing harm.
- Effective care depends on trust-building to prevent despair, withdrawal and homelessness.
Reforming Education and Research
- Mental health education must teach practitioners to handle uncertainty, complexity and small progress.
- Research should prioritise granular, real-world processes over purely large-scale findings.
- People with lived experience must be recognised as practitioners with community wisdom and compensated accordingly.