Building a mental health ecosystem for India: IMHA Launches India’s Largest Cross-Sector Mental Health Alliance with 215 Members in year one

Formed in 2023, IMHA is a first-of-its-kind alliance that strengthens mental healthcare systems by building the networks, capacity, and collaboration needed for high quality collective impact. In its first year, it has brought together organisations across India around a shared purpose - from grassroots mental health organisations to lived experience & caregiver collectives, to cross-sectoral non profit organisations, to philanthropic and institutional funders, across 33 states and union territories.

“What we’ve built with IMHA is a truly collaborative and neutral nation-wide alliance with 215 cross-sectoral organisations in its first year. The strength of the alliance lies in connecting, convening and building collaborative capacities for mental health- bringing together clinical and lived experience expertise; anchored in a shared cross sectoral framework—one that sees mental health not just as a health concern, but as a developmental issue. The fact that we’ve achieved this kind of alignment – of purpose, principles, and perspectives – is itself a powerful marker of what’s possible when collective vision drives lasting change for a marginalized sector like mental health,” remarked Neha Kirpal, Founding Cohort member, India Mental Health Alliance.

Our capacity building  initiatives demonstrate our  commitment to moving beyond awareness to action — by building sustainable, localised, and collaborative models of high quality care. From high quality experiential training programmes for early career psychologists and psychiatrists to specialised programmes on lived experience expertise, suicide prevention etc., IMHA has focussed on systemically redesigning quality of care practice, service design & organisational capabilities at a national level.  In its first year, IMHA has already demonstrated the value of its capacity building initiatives. From psychotherapy video series reaching over 2800 professionals across 100+ cities, to webinar-based practice dialogues engaging nearly 950 professionals, to community-rooted workshops in partnership with grassroots organisations – its programmes span a wide spectrum. The Therapist’s Compass, for instance, supports early-career psychologists with immersive training and mentorship, while its Knowledge Centre hosts over 315 multilingual resources, including tools, research, and field-based practice guides.

The Alliance’s intersectoral orientation, connecting mental health with climate, gender, education and livelihoods ensures that care is not isolated, but embedded into the everyday systems that shape our daily lives. Karan Malik, the Executive Director, reasserts this vision, “People think of mental health care as a very siloed, hierarchical,  bio medical issue and not a community based developmental approach. With IMHA, the idea was to bring in member organisations from across sectors - livelihoods, education, gender, climate, and make visible how mental health cuts across 7 Sustainable Development Goals. Mental health affects outcomes in all these SDGs and is in turn impacted by them, so it must be looked at as a cross-cutting, cross-sectoral issue. By helping them see these overlaps and co-create knowledge, we’re starting to build a sense of shared ownership towards a common purpose of building a responsive mental health ecosystem for India.”

IMHA is not only building programmes and partnerships, but also shaping a philanthropic cohort committed to long-term, systemic investment in mental health. As Vasvi Bharat Ram, the founding trustee aptly puts it, “Our idea is also to encourage others, like ourselves, to come forward to support this space, because it’s still hugely underfunded. But to make that possible, we in the mental health sector need to build better ways of showing the needle is moving – through metrics, reporting, and shared learning.. That’s our commitment to IMHA, not just to fund programmes, but to support the system-building work. And we hope to work with other philanthropists to grow a community of funders who see the value in investing in collective care models & alliances.”

As India’s mental health landscape begins to shift from silos  to systems thinking, IMHA stands at the forefront, not as a single organisation, but as a living alliance of voices, values, and visions. For mental health professionals, IMHA is a space to learn, lead and lean on each other. For organisations, it offers tools, partnerships and the power of scale. For funders and institutions, it is a platform that represents the breadth, depth and diversity of India’s mental health movement – one that is already building a legacy of high quality collaborative care centered around those it seeks to serve.If you’re building, supporting, funding or reimagining mental health in India – IMHA is where your work finds community.

Bringing people together to curate knowledge, facilitate learning and catalyse collective impact for mental health

The India Mental Health Alliance (IMHA) was founded in the latter part of 2023 to build capacity and alliances for mental health in India by Vasvi and Ashish Bharat Ram in partnership with mental health organisations Amaha and Children First. Taking a cross-sectoral approach and centering lived experience expertise; IMHA has developed and delivered several key capacity building programmes and alliance initiatives in the course of a year, reaching 215 member organisations from across India, and 2000+ mental health professionals in its first year alone. The First Annual Convening of IMHA will take place in New Delhi in September 2025.

A section 8 not for profit organisation, IMHA was set up by Founding Trustees Vasvi and Ashish Bharat Ram together with mental health organisations Amaha and Children First. In 2024, IMHA was joined by Manisha Dhawan as Strategic Donor and Board Member.