"Didi, a Woman's Life is Tension": Attitudes Towards Mental Health Among Women in India

In the wake of the Movement for Global Mental Health, the mental health of women living in poverty has been constructed as a growing public health concern and one in need of global intervention. Much of the discourse of this movement, however, is guided by the perspectives of experts and what is missing is the voices of women themselves, particularly from countries in the Global South. In this talk, Saloni will explore findings from her qualitative study conducted during the period 2015-16 to explore how Indian women living in urban slums understand the concepts of mental health, mental illness and treatment. The findings of her study were published in Transcultural Psychiatry (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1363461520947836). The study was built around vignette-based interviews and focus group discussions with a total of 63 women residing in "slum" settlements such as Dharavi in Mumbai. Findings showed that women use the English word “tension” to talk about different forms of mental ill-health, from “ordinary” sources of stress to more profound gendered structures of constraint in their lives, particularly pressures surrounding motherhood, chronic poverty and domestic conflict. In her talk, Saloni will explain these findings and also discuss implications for developing more contextually sensitive approaches to addressing mental ill-health among women in low-income settings in non-Western country contexts.

About the Speaker:
Saloni is interested in the psychological aspects of women's empowerment in marginalised settings, which are under-theorised and understudied.  Her research is interdisciplinary and draws on perspectives from social psychology, development studies and gender studies. Saloni completed her PhD at the Cambridge Institute of Public Health as a Gates scholar (2017-21) as part of which she evaluated the impact of Muktangan's community education project on women's agency (https://www.muktanganedu.org/muktangan-projects/). Prior to her PhD, Saloni completed her MPhil in Social Psychology at Cambridge (2015-16), as part of which she examined how slum-dwelling women conceptualise mental illness. With a view to actioning knowledge, Saloni has worked as a gender research consultant for the Overseas Development Institute and the Observer Research Foundation; and as an impact measurement specialist for Dalberg Advisors Asia and The Social Investment Consultancy based in London.