Help India’s Most Disadvantaged Communities Access Mental Health Services

India has the greatest burden of mental and behavioral disorders. Every sixth Indian needs mental health care. The treatment gap for these disorders ranges between 70% and 92% (NMHS, 2016). The communities we work with deal with intense trauma in their day-to-day lives. Yet, many stay deprived of adequate mental health rehabilitation they require to get back on their feet. To bridge this gap, Jan Sahas has developed an in-house counselling unit to foster resilience among our communities and ensure they have access to mental health care at the grassroot level.

Over the past two decades, Jan Sahas has worked in 116 districts across 13 states of India to improve the socio-economic status of India’s most marginalized groups, particularly migrant workers, survivors of sexual violence, manual scavengers, and individuals affected by caste-based commercial sexual exploitation. Jan Sahas’s interventions are anchored around promoting community leadership, a people-centered participatory approach, and equal opportunity for women with a special focus on girls. 

Through an inclusive, affirmative and trauma-informed approach that’s centered around communities, our focus is on increasing accessibility to mental health care with the help of individual and group psychosocial support provided by trained barefoot and professional counselors. 

Our core focus remains to provide our communities the following: 

• Psychological First Aid: Initial psychosocial support following a crisis event to ensure safety and access to required resources
• Psychoeducation: Essential education and information regarding causes, treatment, and prognosis to increase understanding of experienced mental health concerns
• Crisis Interventions: Immediate and short-term support to stabilise distress and restore functioning provided by trained professionals
• Counseling and Psychotherapy: Long term, ongoing, goal-directed mental health support to enhance psychosocial wellbeing

Your support would enable us to reach over 2000 women and girls across the country and provide them with adequate mental health care.

Workshops conducted in Jabalpur and Khargone, MP

With your contribution, mental health camps were set up in Jabalpur under the Government of India's Ayushman Bharat mission. During this camp, detailed mental health screenings were conducted for all the participants and they also provided us with referrals for people who may require mental health treatments. We also conducted workshops in Khargone Jail to ensure adequate counselling services were available for the inmates.

Thank you for enabling access to mental health services for the most vulnerable groups in MP. Please do continue to share our campaign with your network so that we can broaden the scale of our operations. Your support means a lot to us!