This panel brings together three Indian presenters, one in the British diaspora, two based in India, spanning three decades of age. Two have lived inside psychosis and emerged with something to say about the world that produced it. All three work with clients who experience psychosis, and all three carry an intimate understanding of what it costs to put these experiences into words: the shame, the judgement, and the particular difficulty of voicing what has so often been used against you.
Acquilin (AJ) speaks as an early-career counsellor working with clients experiencing psychosis in India, drawing on an intersectional, trans-inclusive feminist lens to help their clients move away from carceral, colonial mental health systems towards supportive, relational care & stability. They will speak to how mental healthcare inaccessibility, poor cultural sensitivity training amongst service providers, and practices that heighten epistemic injustice, emerge in unexpected ways in the multicultural landscape of India.
Anuckriti (Anu) speaks as a service user and a practising counsellor in India, bringing lived experience of repeated psychotic episodes within a system that repeatedly failed them, alongside the parallel experience of holding space for clients navigating the same terrain.
Neelam (Neels) speaks as a British-Indian lived experience practitioner whose distress was rooted in the intergenerational trauma of Partition, childhood abuse, cultural dislocation, and nearly four decades of misdiagnosis and being ‘bounced’ around within the UK mental health system, before finally gaining access to a therapeutic community and the relational practice model, after 30 years of prescribed medications and traumatic interventions.
What connects these three voices is not a shared diagnosis but a shared question: what are the social conditions that produce distress, and what did it actually take to begin to heal? Together, they trace how psychosis does not happen to individuals in isolation, but within cultures, within histories, within systems of race, gender, caste, and colonial inheritance. Each narrative illustrates how dominant mental health systems, regardless of the country in which they reside, have deepened alienation rather than addressed it: through diagnostic reductionism, cultural ignorance, stigma, marginalisation, care & diagnostic inaccessibility, and the exclusion of those whose suffering does not conform to Western clinical frameworks. Yet the harm has rarely come from systems alone. All three presenters speak to the particular wound inflicted by the people closest to them: friends who blocked contact after a psychotic episode, family members who demanded normal behaviour in the midst of crisis, communities who whispered the word “unstable” and mental health practitioners who shunned the prospect of working with marginalized populations.
This social stigma, operating within families, friendships, workplaces, and care spaces, is not a backdrop to these stories, but a central force within them. It prolongs suffering, fractures relationships that might otherwise offer repair, and leaves people carrying shame and self-blame long after symptoms have receded. The panellists speak honestly about the lasting weight of that judgement, and about what it meant, in contrast, to encounter even one person who did not flinch. Drawing on their own experiences and those of clients and peers, the panellists explore what genuine disalienation has looked like in practice: the family member who laughed along rather than recoiled; the trainee counsellor who stayed present with a dual-diagnosed or complex client when no one else would; the Therapeutic Community that offered peer support, members who for the first time held the experience of becoming known, rather than processed; members who had someone to talk to who did not dismiss them, but made them feel seen and heard, thereby reducing the loneliness in the episodes they experienced; members who were able to hold each other ‘in the moment’. This enabled them to unravel the many layers that had manifested over the years, and help them to work through their challenging behaviours and maladaptive coping strategies.
For the first time, they were not being ‘done to’ by professionals who were trying to “fix” their “illness”. Each story points toward the same conclusion: healing is not something done to a person. It is something built relationally between people. This panel speaks directly to the conference theme. Psychosis, as these three lives demonstrate, is an expression of society's fractures, of Partition's ungrieved losses, of the violence done to marginalised communities, of the burnout and moral injury that fall on those who care without adequate support. Recovery, where it has come, has arrived not through corrected diagnoses or optimised medication regimens, but through relational repair: being seen across difference, trusted across fear, and held inside communities that refused to let them disappear. The panel will present in three sequential voices, followed by open dialogue with the audience. It is designed to be accessible to all experiences (i.e. clinicians, researchers, people with lived experience, family members, and advocates) and aims to leave participants with a transformed understanding of what psychosis is, where it comes from, and what it asks of all of us.
