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Paper short abstract

The mental health sector is constrained by workforce crisis, gendered care burdens, and AI-driven precarity. This qualitative research with women psychologists in India demonstrates self-compassion as a development imaginary in promoting relational resistance, unalienated care, and global wellbeing.

Paper long abstract

The intensifying burden of distress in the post-pandemic world necessitates renewed focus on mental health in realising the Sustainable Development Goals (e.g., SDG-3: Good health and Wellbeing). However, the mental health sector, particularly lower-middle-income countries like India, remains heavily constrained by chronic workforce shortages, uneven service distribution, and gendered care burdens. This disproportionately renders vulnerable the existing practitioners, who are mostly women. The mental health sector positions women as financially empowered agents of care, yet exacerbates job precarity through technological advancements like AI-chatbots that commodify and automate relational work and devalue therapists’ emotional labour.

Drawing from qualitative research on self-compassion among women psychologists in India, this study examines how practitioners negotiate boundaries between self-care and caregiving amid COVID-19 by leveraging self-compassion. It argues that wellbeing should be addressed by attending to the conditions under which care is produced. While Western epistemologies, embedded within Global North-led development frameworks conceptualise self-compassion as individual trait, participants’ narratives reveal it as relational, collective, and ethical practice, and a sustainable resource in transitioning therapy spaces, shaped by intersecting gendered and professional expectations, and socio-cultural landscapes.

Self-compassion enables consciousness-raising to reinterpret personal distress as structurally shaped, challenge reductionistic notions of wellbeing, and imagine possibilities for unalienated care. Cultivated through family support, peer reflection, supervision, and shared narratives of vulnerability, self-compassion fosters solidarity and resistance against neoliberal logic of care that obscures systemic responsibility. It paves way towards development, integrating regulatory safeguards for therapists, building inclusive, contextually-grounded and relationally sustainable mental healthcare, and reclaiming therapy from commodification.