Social Issues Through a Mental Health Lens

Social issues such as gender-based violence, caste-based discrimination, substance misuse, and intergenerational trauma continue to affect millions across India. These are often addressed as legal, economic, or social challenges yet their psychological dimensions remain severely under-examined. Mental health is not simply an outcome of social injustice, it is often a driver, a mediator, and a space of intergenerational impact. At RIHA, we bridge this gap by embedding a mental health lens into the diagnosis, discourse, and design of social reform.

Our approach involves studying the emotional and cognitive roots of social issues, identifying behavioural risk patterns, and developing culturally grounded interventions that strengthen both prevention and community response. We focus on enabling institutions to move upstream from reaction to prevention using evidence, ethical research, and stakeholder collaboration.

Project PURUSH, our flagship initiative under this domain, exemplifies this methodology. The project investigates early psychological indicators among men who have engaged in harmful behaviours, aiming to co-create intervention models that schools, workplaces, and communities can adopt. This enables us to design public-facing reforms that are not only corrective but also anticipatory.

Our contributions include:

Primary and secondary research on the mental health dimensions of complex social problems
Development of preventive frameworks and risk identification tools
Strategic engagement with stakeholders for implementation and scale
Advocacy that reframes public discourse around violence and discrimination through mental health evidence

This domain of impact positions mental health as a foundational element in building just, inclusive, and safer societies. Our goal is to ensure that India’s approach to social justice is informed not only by law and policy, but also by an understanding of human behaviour and healing.

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