Seven organisations redefining mental health in India

Mental healthcare in India is increasingly moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach as lifestyle and culturally-rooted issues lead to complex trauma and distress. 

Across the country, a growing network of organisations and collectives is redefining what healing looks like placing caste, class, gender, sexuality, disability and community at the centre of their work. 

From Chennai’s long-standing trauma care models to Thenkasi’s Dalit-led collective, these initiatives are not just offering therapy, but building ecosystems of care that are culturally rooted, trauma-informed, and accessible. 

By training practitioners, challenging hierarchies within mental health, and creating language for distress that reflect lived experience rather than pathology, they are reshaping how India understands and practices mental health. 

Here’s a look at seven organisations quietly reshaping mental health through a lens of care and justice. 

Mariwala Health Initiative 

Founded in 2015, the Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI) is the personal philanthropy of Harsh Mariwala, founder and chairman of Marico Limited. The Mumbai-based organisation, which is working across India, acts as a grant-maker, capacity builder, and advocacy agency, adopting a rights-based, intersectional psychosocial framework that explicitly recognises how caste, class, gender, sexuality, ability, region and religion shape mental health.

Through funding and strategic support, it has backed over 30 projects with 33 partners across over 20 states, favouring community-based interventions led by marginalised communities. MHI publishes research and resource materials such as the Queer Affirmative Counselling Practice book, and runs national conferences as well. In February 2025, MHI hosted Counter-Narratives, a national mental health  conference that centered on lived experience and the structural determinants of distress.

MHI continues to amplify marginalised voices, anchor suicide-prevention research and build platforms for social-justice-informed mental health.

The Banyan

The Banyan was founded in 1993 in Chennai by Vandana Gopikumar and Vaishnavi Jayakumar to respond to homeless women with psychosocial distress.

Today, the organisation, known for its exhaustive research and trauma-based care, works across ten states in India. It is working to deliver culturally resonant, person-centered care for people with mental health conditions living in poverty, homelessness or exclusion.

The Banyan’s model combines emergency clinical care (Emergency Care & Recovery Centres), supported housing (Home Again), small-group co-living (Magizhvagam), and community outreach (NALAM), with strong representation from people with lived experience (who comprise 32 % of their workforce) and women in leadership (80 %). 

As a value, The Banyan emphasises the social determinants of distress and offers reintegration pathways, livelihood support, and long-term community living rather than institutionalisation.

The Alternative Story 

Founded in 2018, The Alternative Story (TAS) is a mental health collective that offers counselling that is affordable, inclusive, and grounded in feminist, trauma-informed ((understanding that people’s behaviours or emotions may be shaped by past or ongoing trauma), anti-caste, and queer-affirmative approaches. 

Its working model emphasises sliding-scale fees (or pay-what-you-can), challenging the cost barrier in mental health and centering accessibility.

It provides one-on-one therapy, group work, and organisational counselling with a strong emphasis on lived experience and creates services that genuinely meet the needs of marginalised people. 

On social media, TAS engages with community well-being through online support groups —such as those for millennial burnout— and professional training that integrates caste, gender, and sexuality into therapeutic frameworks. 

These initiatives reflect TAS’s evolving commitment to inclusive care that dismantles hierarchies within mental-health spaces and ensures accessibility for marginalised identities.

Another Light Counselling 

Founded by psychologist Aanchal Narang, Another Light offers counselling and psychotherapy with a trauma-informed, queer-affirmative approach.

Based in Mumbai, it provides specialist services virtually across India, including EMDR, Internal Family Systems, kink-affirmative therapy, polyamory counselling and complex-trauma work.

Another Light Counselling makes therapy affordable (for instance, junior counsellor sessions from around Rs 900) and actively partners with NGOs, collectives, police and social-sector organisations to extend outreach and education.

While it is largely a private-practice model rather than a research institution,it contributes to expanding trauma-informed therapy that is sensitive to the experiences of marginalised communities in India.

Pause for Perspective

Pause for Perspective (PFP) was founded in 2013 by clinical psychologist Aarathi Selvan in Hyderabad to provide psychotherapy, couples/family counselling, and community wellness services through a social-justice lens.

It combines one-on-one therapy with outreach in under-served communities and the training of mental-health professionals to use intersectional, feminist and queer-affirmative frameworks.

It actively runs workshops such as Anti-Caste Mental Health and immersive training modules for practitioners to deepen anti-oppressive practice and accountability. These spaces allow both clients and professionals to learn, unlearn,  and build care frameworks that centre dignity and lived experience.

PFP continues to push for contextual, community-based care that challenges inequity within therapeutic practice.

Milir 

Milir is a Dalit-led anti-caste mental health collective Founded by Preethi Shanmugapriya and Aswini Jeyaprakash. Based in Tenkasi, Tamil Nadu, it explores the psychosocial impacts of casteism through support groups and culturally grounded therapy.

Milir emphasises healing justice, anti-oppressive frameworks, narratives rooted in lived experiences of caste trauma and intergenerational distress, and peer-led support rather than traditional clinical models.

It is active in research and collective practice and regularly hosts workshops and reflection circles such as peer-support sessions for Dalit neurodivergent adults—creating safe, collective spaces for healing and political awareness.

Milir is also building practitioner training rooted in caste literacy and embodied trauma work, helping professionals re-examine their own social positioning. 

As a relatively new collective, Milir’s focus remains on building anti-caste mental health dialogue, training and peer solidarity.

Anubhuti Trust 

Anubhuti Trust, founded by Deepa Pawar in 2015, is a non-profit organisation based in Thane, Mumbai. It is led by women who have experienced caste, class, gender. and language-based discrimination.

Anubhuti’s model centres youth leadership, mental-justice workshops, and the training of mental-health practitioners to recognise casteism, anti-oppressive frameworks, and culturally rooted metaphors.

It offers workshops such as Relationships & Mental Health for NT-DNT/Bahujan young women and uses folk metaphors and culturally informed language to make mental-health care meaningful for Dalit and Adivasi communities.

It is now focused on building a new vocabulary of care through storytelling and lived experiences of marginalised youth.