Manas Foundation is a registered trust dedicated to mental health care for the individual and the community. Mental health needs are diverse and span a wide spectrum of ages, social contexts and family structures. Manas attempts to address these diverse mental health needs with a multidisciplinary team based approach.
Manas began functioning six years ago in 2000 when its founder members - Ms. Monica Kumar (Clinical Psychologist), Ms. Joysree Mukherji (Special Educator) and Dr. Amiya Banerjee (Psychiatrist) - set out to implement their vision of providing comprehensive mental health care for all.
Mental wellbeing is a function of the social and interpersonal matrix within which every person lives. The influences of culture, family and society need to be understood well if we want to understand the individual. At Manas, our efforts reflect the needs of the community, and socially relevant mental health services form the core group of our activities. These Community projects are complemented by specialised clinical services like Psychotherapy, Child Guidance, Individual and Family Counselling, Behaviour Therapy, Psychiatric Treatment and Rehabilitation. Manas also conducts regular educational and training programmes on various aspects of mental health for professionals, students, parents and lay persons.
Today, the Manas mental health team includes:
3 Senior Psychologists
1 Senior Special Educator
1 Senior Psychiatrist
3 Junior Psychologists
6 Junior Special Educators
1 Speech Therapist
1 Occupational Therapist
In addition to accommodating clinical services for the fifty odd clients who visit Manas daily, the premises at Okhla provides office support and seminar room facilities for the community projects and educational training programmes conducted by our team of mental health professionals.
OUR CURRENT EMPHASIS
From its inception, the focus of Manas has been clinical and community work in the area of mental health. Over the years we have developed our community initiatives. The mission statement of Manas Foundation for this year is to improve mental health facilities and services for women and the youth.
Women constitute 50% of our country’s population. Increasing responsibilities, violence against women, social and economic constraints, put burden on women, and as a group, make them more vulnerable to experiencing stress, and emotional, psychological difficulties.
We believe that if the mental health needs of women are addresed, alongwith their economic, social and legal needs/ difficulties, we can work towards facilitating their holistic growth., helping them to become more self-reliant, and finding within themselves the internal resources needed to take up life’s challenges head-on.
We are in the process of developing a program on improving access to and availability of mental healthcare services for women in Delhi. We are looking to collaborate with other/various NGOs working in the area of women’s welfare, and funding agencies to making this program a reality. We welcome any support- in the form of funding, volunteer work, or creative ideas and suggestions from you for this endeavour!
Adolescents constitute 21% of India’s population., and are going to become the adults of tomorrow. They will be running the government, enterprises, health services, and so on. It is important that we address their mental health needs today, in order to enable them to become more resilient, positive members of the society. Maturational changes, along with increasing demands placed on them by families, schools, peer group and the society make adolescents a vulnerable group too. Their issues, needs and concerns have to be brought to the forefront.
