Mehac is registered as a Charitable Trust (Registration no: 1850, October 2008, New Delhi, India; Registered under the Act of Registration of Deeds).

Our Vision

The Mental Health Action Foundation (Mehac Foundation) is a Not-for-Profit organisation that aims to contribute to improved mental health care in India by integrating Psychiatry with Medicine.

It would promote this objective by pursuing a broad concept of wellness, which would have community oriented care of patients as its central focus. Mehac will aim at delivering sustainable and relevant integrated psychosocial care linking training, clinical services and research activities through medical networks involving resources and volunteers in the community.

The challenge in the developing world is to evolve a culturally and socio-economically appropriate and acceptable system of care that addresses psychosocial issues along with long-term care needs and that is accessible to the majority of those who need it.

The Indian Scenario

Mehac was formed with the aim of contributing to the improving community mental health care scenario in India. Community mental health programmes were initiated at the national level decades ago but it is only recently that there has been a renewal of interest in this area.

Traditionally, the mental health care system has run in parallel to the rest of the medical care delivery systems in India. Psychiatric hospitals have been stand-alone institutions, operating along the ‘asylum’ model of Psychiatric care. Gradually, Psychiatric units have been established in medical colleges and in district hospitals which can be seen as the start of a process of integration of Psychiatry into the rest of Medicine.

The renewal of interest in Community Psychiatry has seen the introduction of District Mental Health Programmes in various parts of India. The National Rural Health Mission is actively involved in facilitating this. The clinical input comes from local departments of Psychiatry or mental health institutions. Typically, teams run outpatient clinics in small towns and rural areas at regular intervals, supplying free medicines. Large numbers of patients are seen in this way and the main modality of clinical treatment is pharmacological.

However, there is a need for new models of Community Psychiatry, accepting that shortages of mental health professionals will persist in the foreseeable future. It is unrealistic to expect that a parallel system of mental health care will develop, run by professionally qualified Psychiatrists, Psychologists, Psychiatric nurses or others. Instead, we have to think of a different model based on training health professionals and others to provide mental health services in conjunction with other medical services. This will also help to reduce the stigma that mental illnesses attract and breakdown the barriers that exist.

In India, the biggest available resource is its populace. Time and again, people’s participation in health and other social movements have attracted widespread attention. The ongoing community palliative care movement in Kerala is the latest example of this. Given the limited number of trained professionals, this is a model which can be followed in Community Psychiatric care as well.

Projects

As its first project, Mehac has initiated a community mental health program in 2 districts of Kerala. Mehac will work in collaboration with partners already involved in delivering medical care in the community and with interested volunteers and families. Mehac aims to provide mental health care of good quality through a network of volunteers underpinned by a secure, robust internet based record system.