The SAMVAD Story…its Birth & Inception
The National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), a tertiary care Mental Health Establishment, under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, is an academic institution and a teaching hospital. In recognition of the needs and gaps in specialized services for children and adolescents, and with the support of the Dept. of Women & Child Development, between 2014 and 2019, the Dept. of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, NIMHANS, implemented a Community-Based Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service Project. This project provided preventive, promotive and curative mental health services to children and adolescents, and was also engaged extensively in training and capacity building initiatives for child care service providers and other stakeholders in child protection and mental health, from government and non-government agencies across different states of the country as well as in neighbouring SAARC countries.
A project that began slowly, bringing a public child mental health perspective to the country, helping schools, anganwadis, child care institutions and courts to acknowledge the importance of integrated approaches to child mental health and protection, gained momentum, especially as it drew to close, towards the end of 2018.
Furthermore, and over time, the requests received by NIMHANS and this Community Project for training and capacity building of various stakeholders, on the subject areas of child mental health and protection, ranging from government ICPS staff to anganwadi workers, teachers, Child Welfare Committee (CWC) and Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) members, and judicial personnel (including Principal Magistrates of the Juvenile Justice Boards and Special Court/Children’s Court/District and Sessions Judges), from across the country (and indeed from neighboring countries too) had increased manifold.
Meanwhile, there were also other specific imperatives that acted as catalysts for such requests for training and capacity building and enhanced protection and mental health assistance to children. The Muzzafarpur child care institution abuse incidents of 2018 led the Supreme Court and Central Government to take stock of how the Juvenile Justice Act 2015 is being implemented in various states—and the results have been far from satisfactory. Consequently, as states evaluated their child care and protection systems, they also realized the need for stronger support on technical approaches, program design and capacity building—for which several of them approached NIMHANS.
In recognition of the work and impact of the Community Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service Project, the benefits that a premier technical institute such as NIMHANS could bring to child care services and systems, and in its infinite wisdom, based on its extensive knowledge and understanding of child protection and mental health needs, the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) invited NIMHANS to propose an initiative to scale up its community child public activities, with a particular focus on standardization of child protection and mental health assessments and interventions and related capacity building activities, to have a national reach.
Consequently, in August 2019, in response to the increasingly complex needs of child protection and mental health and the felt needs for training and capacity building, the Dept. of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, submitted a proposal to MoWCD for a dedicated initiative for child and adolescent mental health and protection– in order to be able to provide technical and capacity building support to states across India, in the areas of child protection and mental health.
Within a brief time-span of barely a couple of months, in October 2019, this proposal was principally approved by MoWCD. Shortly after, in February 2020, when no one had any idea that a pandemic to hit not just the country but the world at large, the Hon’ble Minister of MoWCD, Ms. Smriti Zubin Irani requested the NIMHANS team to meet with her at the Ministry. While the original proposal submission had suggested a 3-year period for the child protection-mental health initiative, Ms. Irani provided several visionary inputs: she was insistent that the initiative develop a separate vertical to address child mental health and protection issues in the education sector (in fact this is how SAMVAD cam to have its 4th and what is now an exceedingly busy and critical thematic area of work); knowing the quantum of work and demand in a large country such as India, Ms. Irani also suggested extending the time-period for the project, increasing the staff numbers; she therefore committed her support in terms of an exceedingly generous budget that was nearly five time the original amount that NIMHANS had erstwhile proposed.
With MoWCD’s unwavering commitment to child protection and mental health, and the Hon’ble Minister’s backing and support, despite the COVID pandemic and country-wide lockdown, NIMHANS established the National Centre & Integrated Resource for Child Protection, Mental Health, & Psychosocial Care in June 2020.
While the Initiative’s work aims to assist all children and adolescents, it lays particular emphasis on those who are from difficult circumstances. Adverse Childhood Circumstances (ACEs) refer to stressful and/or traumatic events that happen during the first 18 years of a person’s life, and have negative impacts on physical health, cognitive, learning, emotional and behavioural issues in children in adolescents; in the medium to long term, including into adulthood, they also lead to mental health morbidity. Thus, given MoWCD’s mandate not only to promote child well-being, mental health and safety, but also to prevent (further) violence, abuse and mental health morbidity in children and adolescents, the Initiative focuses particularly on children who are at risk, and particularly vulnerable, due to residing in difficult circumstances, to protection and mental health problems. In order to reflect its focus and priority therefore, the Initiative was christened SAMVAD (Support, Advocacy & Mental health interventions for children in Vulnerable circumstances And Distress).
What Makes SAMVAD Unique?
Having been in operation for just about a year and a half now, SAMVAD has made tremendous strides in various areas of child protection and mental health, including in the educational and judicial spaces. SAMVAD has also been a pioneer in many ways, with many ‘firsts’, such as…
A first and one-of-a-kind technical centre that works to integrate and provide technical support on child mental health and protection, through training and capacity building, research and mentoring for child services.
Collaborations with National Institutes (such as NIPCCD, National Police Academies, National Legal Services Authority, National Judicial Academy, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mental Health Institutions), Centres of Excellence in Mental Healthcare, State Judicial Academies and High Courts, Ministries/ State Departments of Education, Women & Child Development/Social Welfare—to ensure the integration of child protection and mental health concerns into the mandate and work of all such institutions.
Large scale of implementation of technical activities—reaching 29 states within its relatively short duration of operation. SAMVAD’s newest technical initiative is a revolutionary one, as it prepares to increase its geographic coverage not only in terms of states but to Panchayati Raj Institutions—to enable the percolation of child protection and mental health awareness to grassroot levels and communities where some of the most vulnerable children reside.
Developing innovations in teaching and learning methods via virtual knowledge networks that would enable not only increased coverage of service providers for training and capacity building but also retain participatory, creative and skill-based pedagogies that address the dynamic needs of field workers/care providers. It is noteworthy that SAMVAD assumed operations when we were already in the midst of the pandemic; and when the lockdown and closing of schools, and other child protection issues became concerning, with mental health and psychosocial care taking on a new significance. However, the pandemic did not deter SAMVAD from initiating and then rapidly increasing its operations. With the encouragement and enablement of MoWCD, and its strategic provision of direction to assist its operations, SAMVAD in fact, leveraged technology, to an extent far surpassing that which existed in pre-COVID times. It has thus been a true field example of “digital India”—one that has helped child mental health and protection permeate to the farthest corners of the country. Within the first year of its operation, SAMVAD also expanded its online training and reach through the establishment of 2 additional Virtual Knowledge Network rooms (over and above the existing 4 that proved to be insufficient to accommodate the increasing national demands for capacity building and technical support).
Using of transdisciplinary approaches in functioning, that enable child mental health to interface effectively with multiple stakeholders from various disciplines i.e. strengthen the role and contributions of a mono-discipline (child mental health) through collaborations with and education of other disciplines (such as law and policy, education and health) to resolve complex child mental health and protection problems. One of the recent outcomes of SAMVAD’s transdisciplinary models of functioning is the first ever training program in the country on “Essential Interventions & Skills for Working with Child Sexual Abuse: Introducing Mental Health & Legal Dimensions of Forensics”—for health/mental health professionals and to legal and judicial officers. In fact, SAMVAD is one of the few, if not only child mental health agencies that contains a law and policy vertical that inputs into protection, mental health and education work, and that heavily inputs into judicial training and education (through State High Courts and Judicial Academies) on child and law issues.
Conducts relevant and innovative research in the areas of child protection and mental health, to inform field action (services and interventions) and law and policy. In the firm belief that the objectives of child mental health and protection work can only be served by recognizing the complex realities of children’s lived realities, SAMVAD draws upon such issues and field challenges and dilemmas to conduct research. One such example is its latest research undertaking on the conundrum of adolescent consent. With the understanding that adolescent capacities for consent have implications for the implementation of laws on child sexual abuse and juvenile justice, but also determine personal safety and mental health, SAMVAD is undertaking research to develop methodologies that incorporate psychological knowledge on abuse dynamics, adolescent mental health and development, vulnerability and risk, to assess adolescent sexual consent and sexual decision-making processes. Other research studies examine current issues ranging from the implementation of juvenile transfer laws to the impact of COVID on child protection systems, and teacher’s coping with digital teaching methods in the wake of the pandemic.
In sum, SAMVAD is a unique partnership, between a premier National Institute that has specialized professional expertise on children, and a Ministry that has demonstrated its commitment to child protection, mental health and welfare—a cooperation that has enormous implications for the building and strengthening of what can otherwise become a fragmented child protection and welfare system in a country as large and culturally diverse as India is.