Research To Policy : A dialogue on mental health of the young people of India

SAMA’s research to policy work package aims to promote school research in India and identify implementation facilitators and barriers across our intervention components. Transforming research into policy is crucial for creating effective, evidence based solutions to societal challenges, promoting accountability and transparency and ensuring that resources are used efficiently to benefit society. It is a fundamental aspect of good governance and decision making (Keping, 2018).

At SAMA we attempted to analyse policies that have direct implications on the young people of the country. Policy analysis is the process of discovering prospective policy solutions that could address the issues and evaluating those options to determine which is the most effective, efficient, and practical (Centre for disease control and prevention, n.d.). Policy analysis is important because conducting a policy analysis ensures we have gone through a systematic process to choose the policy option that may be best for our situation.

It was found that primarily the National Education Policy (2020) holds great significance and can affect the lives of the young people to a large extent. It is important to note that Government of  India is also starting to strategically engage in important dialogues related to mental health and have various polices at place to addresses mental health issues like - Mental Health Act 2017, National Suicide Prevention Strategy etc.

Consequently, we at SAMA started analysing the national education policy to identify areas where the policy and SAMA interventions coincide. It was noticed that the NEP focuses to a great extent on the early childhood care and other relevant mental health issues that young people usually face due to various stressors. We also found that NEP, 2020 emphasises on the importance of appointing a social worker at schools who would be taking care of the children’s rights and wellbeing at school. We were able to draw many parallels with the visions of NEP and what SAMA has been already incorporating in our interventions with adolescents. For instance SAMA has lay counsellors who have been trained rigorously and disseminate whole school mental health components. Further policy analysis also helped us to understand the existing gaps and areas where additional research is required. By examining the current policy and their outcomes we at SAMA tried to pinpoint areas where additional research can provide valuable insights. We also interviewed multiple stakeholders like teachers, policymakers, researchers etc which also helped us to understand their perspectives and ground realities.

At the end of work package the SAMA team had a policy consultation event where stakeholders from various spheres like policy professionals, government officials, teachers, members of non-governmental organisations, youth etc came together to have a discourse on involvement of youth’s voice in decision making and policy implementation. We also engaged in discussions related to upscaling of our research findings for whole school mental health programs in India which is currently lacking.

Working closely with policies for me has been a very interesting process. It required a detailed understanding of the foundation of the policy, delving into a wide range of sources from academic papers, government reports to interviews with experts and stakeholders. One of the first tasks was to define the problem that the policy aims to address. This involved looking at the issue from multiple angles considering the historic contexts and understanding its impact on various communities and sectors.

Initially in my experience, analysing the policies stemmed a lots of doubts about the objectives considering that the policies are often complex and multi-faceted. However, as we reviewed various official documents and relevant literature we were able to find the answers to the doubts. In addition, listening to policy professionals during event provided a clearer picture about the same. One of the most significant aspects of the event was that the stakeholders were directly able to raise their queries and doubts and the policymakers were also able to listen and understand the challenges of people working in the ground. This direct conversation with the stakeholders and the policymakers shed light on a lot of nuances. Furthermore, the clarifications provided by the policymakers helped everyone to understand the points that might have been misinterpreted due to a lack of understanding of the context. The policy consultation event demonstrated a great success where the attendees were able to engage in fruitful discussions for potential solutions to access barriers and on ways to exemplify the role of youth in the decision making process. This event has been an excellent ground for collaboration and knowledge sharing and we hope that this expedites future discourses on young people’s mental health in India.  

Bibliography

Keping, Y. (2018). Governance and Good Governance: A New Framework for Political Analysis. Fudan Journal of the Humaities and Social Sciences , 1-8.

Centre for disease control and prevention. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/policy/polaris/policyprocess/policyanalysis/index.html