IPH seminar: When community care becomes community mental health

Sudarshan Kottai, doctoral candidate at IIT Hyderabad, will be presenting a seminar titled ” When community care becomes community mental health: The disappearance of local voices in community mental health programmes in Kerala.”  

In response to the global call to upscale mental health services in low- and middle-income countries, many NGOs have sprung up in Kerala to address mental health needs by partnering with locally grown, bottom-up, community-led organizations. This talk by Sudarshan is based on a clinical ethnography of community mental health programmes. Drawing on observations, interviews, and narratives between various stakeholders of these programmes, this talk will illustrate how the community-led volunteer-based pain and palliative programmes are gradually being eclipsed by the mental health NGOs. Sudarshan argues that scaling up of services through aggressive task-shifting via local volunteers is a socio-politico-moral process that can pose serious consequences for the lives of the most vulnerable citizens.  

You are invited to attend the seminar in person or over Zoom using the link below: https://zoom.us/j/701662546