Each month, an individual at a different ACU member institution is invited to write the introduction for this newsletter, providing an opportunity to highlight different perspectives. This month, Chetna Duggal from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India writes for us about the pandemic and mental health. Dear , The psychosocial reverberations of the COVID-19 pandemic have put immense pressure on an already overburdened mental health care system in India. To support individuals and families in crisis, therapists and counsellors switched to remote methods of reaching out to clients and started volunteering through COVID-dedicated helplines. Being on the frontlines and providing psychosocial first aid to those in crisis over extended hours in a new format, while themselves fearing the risk of COVID-19 for our own family members, left many practitioners feeling exhausted, burnt-out and emotionally vulnerable. It has been widely recognised that supportive supervision can play a critical role in enhancing competencies of crisis-care practitioners and promoting their well-being during caregiving. In recognition of this need, Rahbar – a field action project led by the School of Human Ecology at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, India which promotes training and supervision for mental health practitioners based on principles of social justice, trauma-informed and strengths-based practice – initiated services to support therapists and counsellors during the pandemic. Mental health practitioners and organisations reached out to Rahbar for support with navigating the challenges of telephone counselling, to enhance their knowledge and skills in supporting people diagnosed with COVID-19, to counsel the elderly and children particularly at risk, and to manage their own psychological well-being and self-care. Since April 2020, Rahbar has supported counsellors of two major national level helplines, two state-level helplines, 12 organisations, and over 400 mental health professionals in India and outside. In June 2020 Rahbar was invited to collaborate with the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), the apex government body for disaster management in India headed by the Prime Minister of India, to provide training and supervision support to volunteer counsellors of NDMA’s psychosocial care helpline for persons diagnosed with COVID-19. A training manual is now available, developed in collaboration with NDMA: ‘Psychosocial Support during the COVID-19 pandemic: A training manual for counsellors’. NDMA and Rahbar have also documented this work through the research titled ‘Psychosocial Support for Individuals Diagnosed with Covid-19: Experiences of Volunteer Counsellors from India’. Rahbar is now launching a postgraduate diploma to train counselling and psychotherapy supervisors in India. In the same vein, building resilience in a pandemic is the focus of this year’s ACU Summer School, which the Jamshetji Tata School of Disaster Studies at TISS is delivering in partnership with the ACU. 50 students from across the Commonwealth will join us for two weeks of lectures, intercultural sessions and group work on the theme ‘Urban disasters: Risk and resilience in a pandemic’. Keep an eye on the ACU website and social media channels for updates. Chetna Duggal, PhD
Associate Professor & Faculty Leader, Rahbar
School of Human Ecology
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India |
