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Short abstract:

This paper presents the work of The Banyan, an Indian organization, that develops and scales up services for homeless persons and low-income households experiencing mental health issues. It explores linkages between the ‘global’ and ‘local’ in services and research, in the context of two examples.

Long abstract:

Growing research on mental health, drawing parallels across global contexts, has helped make broad inferences, and implement new learnings. However, considering that local practices strongly influence outcomes, how do we understand the interplay of ‘global’ and ‘local’ in mental healthcare services and research?

The Banyan is a 3-decade-old Indian organisation that develops and scales up services for homeless persons and low-income households experiencing mental health issues. This paper will facilitate dialogue around the “global”, “local,” and culturally congruent scale-up, using examples of two projects at The Banyan. First, Home Again, a model that offers community-based housing and supportive services across 3 LMICs - India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Second, reflections will be presented from an ongoing process of expanding a research and social action program, focusing on children of parents with mental illness.

While Home Again was first limited to one district in India, feedback loops and evaluations of outcomes have contributed to value frameworks and protocols, scale-up across geographies, and evidence upon which global funding has been garnered. In the context of child and adolescent mental health, a systematic consolidation of evidence from other low-and-middle-income countries, in combination with the participation of locally present youth advocates, and intuitive care practices practised historically at the organisation, contribute to an evolving framework for action. Using these examples, the paper explores the trickle-down of the ‘global’ into the ‘local’ and vice versa, the mechanisms of local contextualization in global projects, and the process of linking theories such as transdisciplinary research to practice.