Mariwala Health Initiative

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Mariwala Health Initiative

A Mental health funding&advocacy agency with a focus on marginalised communities Our goal is to improve the overall well-being in India.

The Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI) is a funding organisationin the field of mental health in India. We conceptualize well-being as a combination of mental health and social factors and aspire to create a holistic mental health ecosystem in India that is accessible to everyone across social landscapes. We are a catalyzing and enabling force for organizations that strive towards this goal. We align with a rights-based, psychosocial approach that consider mental health concerns as a disability. We expand on the narrow medical understandings of mental health and illness and looks at it through a systemic lens. We understand caste, gender, religion, region, ability and s*xuality based oppression as a major contributor to mental health distress. We encourage community-based interventions and actively promote deinstitutionalization of mental health services. We are a feminist, LGBTQ affirmative and user-survivor centered organization.

30/10/2025

With 850+ mental health professionals trained in q***r-affirmative practice, and over 500 practitioners listed in our open-access database 🌈 , the Q***r Affirmative Counselling Practice (QACP) continues to build a growing network of care that affirms q***r and trans lives.

Explore the QACP-trained practitioner database here ⬇️
🔗 https://shorturl.at/605Ue

🟡 Please note: The practitioners listed have completed the QACP course by MHI. We encourage individuals to do their own due diligence before approaching any mental health practitioner. Completion of the course does not guarantee affirmative practice, and MHI is not responsible for practitioners’ actions. Community feedback remains the best guide for choosing supportive care.

***raffirmativecare ***rmentalhealth ***rrights

27/10/2025

Dr. Manju Madhavan speaks about the urgent need for medical practitioners to build awareness and sensitivity towards inters*x persons. The diverse bodies are not a problem, but the lack of understanding often is.

🎥 Watch the full Panel 4: Counter-Narratives to Body-Gender Binaries on YouTube: link in bio

Jointly organized by MHI, HSNC University & KC College.

*xRights

26/10/2025

“Over time, through conversations with inters*x adults, parents, and healthcare providers across India, it became clear that what was missing were practical, affirming resources rooted in human rights, affirmation, and our own cultural realities.”

On *xawarenessday , MHI draws upon Koushumi Sujata Chakraborti’s observations - and highlights ICFI’s efforts to address the vulnerabilities experienced by inters*x children in absence of affirmative care and resources. >>

🔗 To access this resource, visit icfi.org.in

*x *xawarenessday

16/10/2025

Supported by MHI, has been actively working on providing relief support to communities residing rural & remote areas in Cooch Behar, North Bengal which has been recently devastated by flood.

Understanding the urgent requirement for food & other necessities during such a disaster, Moitrisanjog remains committed to meeting the basic needs of communities that remain outside the reach of formal relief mechanisms - which includes s*x workers, LGBTQI+, caste-oppressed. >>

10/10/2025

This World Mental Health Day and World Homeless Day, Mariwala Health Initiative is proud to support the launch of Surviving Heat on the Streets: An Assessment of the Psychosocial Impacts of Extreme Heat on Homeless Persons by Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) India.

The report examines how structural inequities and environmental precarity intersect to shape the psychosocial well-being of people living without shelter. Drawing from lived experiences, it traces how extreme heat contributes to exhaustion, confusion, sleeplessness, anxiety, and despair — revealing the deep entanglement between climate vulnerability and mental distress.

As heatwaves intensify, the report urges policymakers and practitioners to address homelessness as a public mental health concern — situating climate justice, housing rights, and psychosocial well-being within the same frame of care and equity.

📘 Read the full report — link in bio/ visit mhi.org.in

09/10/2025

In the light of — MHI notes how in sports or any other performance-driven platforms, persons with disabilities continue to face bigger obstacles compared to non-disabled contemporaries. For persons with cerebral palsy, delayed and limited support add further burden to the mental and physical demands of performing to one's best capabilities.

The recognition of accessibility as a fundamental right is there along with laws like RPwD Act, but its real life implementations call for improving accessibility standards and making them mandatory across systems and services. >>

07/10/2025

2 years on, we continue to witness the relentless violence and Genocide in Gaza. Dr. Samah Jabr, the head of the Mental Health Unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health questions the dominant modalities of mental health work that are biomedical and individualist, and offers insight into how faith, solidarity, and community can function as pathways for resistance and recovery for Palestinians.

To read the full piece from ReFrame VI: Global Mental Health from the Margins, click the link in bio | visit reframe 2024.mhi.org.in

Illustration by Lina Jadarat.

29/09/2025

Ambedkarite feminist activist Chhaya Khobragade bore witness to the aftermath of the Khairlanji massacre.

She writes for MHI: “This invisible terror of caste destroys Dalit lives. It snatches away our chances to live fully, to progress, to hope.”

Khairlanji was not only a massacre. It left deep psychological scars of fear, despair, and silencing communities for years. An entire generation of women leaders and young people carried this trauma, showing how caste violence devastates minds and futures long after the bloodshed.

19/09/2025

📣 We are excited to announce a webinar on 'Su***de Prevention in South Asia: Challenges, Successes, and Shared Learnings'!

Join us on 23rd September to delve into insightful discussions with our wonderful speakers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, with the goal to develop a dedicated platform to foster knowledge-sharing, to build capacity, and coordinate culturally sensitive engagement with su***de prevention.

🔗 Access the registration form in our bio.

18/09/2025

On Equal Pay Day, we look beyond salaries to the brick kilns where women work long hours moulding bricks yet remain unpaid in their own names. Wages go to men, leaving women undocumented and excluded from government schemes.

Unequal pay here is not just missing wages, it is denied agency, invisibilised labour, and the mental toll of watching one’s earnings controlled by others. Recognition, documentation, and equal pay are not only labour rights but also matters of dignity and mental health justice.

Address

Grande Palladium, Old CST Road, Kalina
Mumbai

Telephone

+912266480500

Website

http://www.mhi.org.in/

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