This book creates a scope for achieving mental wellbeing apart from the currently dominant mental health practices, critiqued for their damaging effects on individuals and families. By broadly drawing on salutary possibilities, it brings evidence of existing and emerging approaches to resolve mental distress.

The unique volume brings several practices and testimonies together that can support people’s healing and recovery, focusing on the following key interventions:

• Different ways of looking at emotional suffering beyond psy-knowledge, which many doctors, social workers, disability scholars, legal or policy experts and psy-professionals advocate for
• The role of expressive arts employed by both professionals and peers
• Efficacy of peer engagement of a professional nature in India, the newest globally emerging phenomenon, often heralded as the future of mental health worldwide

Deftly interwoven with patient and peer narratives in jargon-free language, this one-of-a-kind book brings practices and choices that can facilitate healing and ways out of permanent psychiatric patient-hood. This volume may be of interest to psychiatric and other helping professionals, therapists, researchers, current patients, caregivers, service providers, social workers, non-profits, students of psychology, social work and disability studies, as well as legal and policy experts.

Prateeksha Sharma is a peer psychotherapist, researcher, and musicologist working out of New Delhi. She is the founder of Bright Side Family Counseling Center, an organization committed to helping people recover from all setbacks. She wears research and teaching hats almost permanently, and her first monograph is titled Barriers to Recovery from Psychosis.