Sangath

At the heart of our vision is the reduction of the treatment gap for mental disorders and disabilities in India – the large gap between the number of people with mental disorders/disability and those who receive adequate health care. To reduce this treatment gap Sangath has adopted an approach which is characterised by several principles: 

• Designing interventions based on global evidence of effectiveness and local evidence of cultural acceptability;
• Systematically testing intervention delivery to ensure feasibility of its delivery by lay health workers and acceptability by patients and families;
• Involving diverse stakeholders, in particular people affected by the target mental health problems, in shaping the content and delivery of the intervention;
• Embedding the intervention in established health care platforms, most commonly those run by the government, to ensure scalability;
• Evaluating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the intervention in randomized controlled trials;
• Disseminating the findings in a variety of methods, ranging from scientific papers to audio-visual media; 
• Working closely with federal and state ministries of health to scale up the innovations.

Using this approach Sangath has been able to successfully develop evidence based, contextually appropriate and scalable models of care for a range of health problems like depression, schizophrenia and autism.