DR B.R. AMBEDKAR UNIVERSITY DELHI
CENTRE FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY AND CLINICAL RESEARCH (CPCR)
AWAAZ 2022 The Imagination of Mental Health in an Educational Institution: A Place for Continuity of Experience
CONCEPT NOTE
What is the place of Mental Health in an Educational Institution? An Educational Institution is a space of true democracy. Students from various social, economic, cultural and religious backgrounds come together to bring richness to this space. But this richness is also coming through their own lived experiences and life histories. Every educational institution is imagined as an inclusive space as only then could it facilitate the emergence of Identities. But sometimes these identities also come out = broken words, lost selves looking for a space which can contain and give a story to their experience which can become liveable. Sometimes education also initiates this process as students learn to deconstruct their structures. Emotional crises are heightened as they struggle to bridge the learning from the social sciences with the normative structures of families and communities. Mental health is envisaged to facilitate this journey by providing
students with a safe space to engage with crises of selfhood, sexuality and mental distress. An inclusive clinic is a space which “remembered” and “grounded” a person currently engrossed in the process of sociocultural- emotional un-integration
This time, through Awaaz, a mental health awareness initiative by CPCR, we are devoting a whole month to help students imagine different parts of their own identities. We wish to give voices, stories, music to their nascent Identities which are still struggling with broken or as-yet-not-formed words. Some parts of our identities are also lost to blankness symbolic of systemic eradication of our being. We also wish to recover some of those forgotten identities.
