Context

• The experiences of people who grew up without care, endured homelessness after childhood abuse, or faced dehumanising psychiatric treatment reveal forms of suffering that cannot be captured through numerical indicators alone.
• These accounts show how distress emerges and manifests differently across lives shaped by deprivation, stigma, and systemic neglect.
• When mental health discourse focuses narrowly on symptoms and integration into predefined norms, barriers, social attitudes, and structural inequities remain overlooked.

Beyond the Deficit Lens

• Dominant approaches continue to view psychosocial disability through a deficit-oriented framework, emphasising integration into communities that reinforce narrow ideas of productivity and normality.
• This persists despite global gaps in mental health-care access of 70%–90% and despite advances in medication and therapy.
• These improvements have not addressed fundamental questions about the social conditions that produce suffering or the need for care grounded in dignity, agency, and equity.

Understanding Distress in Context

• A reimagined mental health system must centre dignity and disability justice, acknowledging that suffering arises from interactions between personal histories and broader societal forces.
• Material and relational deprivation often both precipitate and result from mental ill-health.
• Data linking suicides to family conflicts and relational ruptures point to deeper layers of shame, alienation, and abandonment, which are rarely spoken about or addressed.
• Explanations for distress, biological, psychological, social, cultural, political, and historical—are interlocking rather than competing frameworks.
• These influences intersect with caste, class, gender, and queer identities, shaping both experiences of distress and access to care.
• Effective mental health support requires attention to this overlapping complexity rather than reducing suffering to a single cause.

Care as Meaning-Making and Relational Justice

• People experiencing crises need space to explore uncertainty, identity, vulnerability, and purpose, yet mainstream models often prioritise biological or social determinants at the expense of these meaning-making processes.
• While tangible supports such as housing, medication, and financial assistance are essential, they cannot resolve feelings of disconnection or existential incoherence.
• Care must integrate material support with relational work, acknowledging that meaning and recovery unfold within a person’s social and ecological context.
• This orientation aligns with disability justice, which seeks liberation, wholeness, and autonomy, not mere integration into unequal systems.

The Way Forward

• Justice-Centred Model
  • A justice-centred model reframes treatment from ‘What is wrong with this person?’ to What does this person need to live the life they want?
  • This may include medication, community connection, spiritual grounding, or economic stability. This shift also strengthens trust and continuity of care, addressing common experiences of disillusionment and disengagement.
  • Building trust requires collaboration, dialogue, and acceptance of non-linear progress.
  • Justice, understood as recognising mutual obligations and repairing harms, demands that mental health care acknowledge the social contexts that create suffering.
  • Care cannot be ethical if it ignores the injustices that shaped a person’s distress.
• Transforming Care, Education, and Research
  • Transforming the system requires changes across training, practice, and research.
  • Mental health education should prepare practitioners to sit with uncertainty, navigate complex social realities, and value small wins.
  • Research must prioritise context-sensitive, granular insights over purely large-scale generalisations, employing transdisciplinary methods that link theory and practice to understand what works, for whom, and why.

Conclusion

• Those with lived experience and community members often labelled as non-specialists must be recognised as essential practitioners.
• Their experiential knowledge and contextual understanding provide forms of expertise that formal training cannot replace.
• They must receive fair compensation, training, and systemic support comparable to formally credentialed professionals.

About Monroe Doctrine:

• The Monroe Doctrine, articulated by U.S. President James Monroe in 1823, is a significant S. foreign policy statement aimed at preventing European intervention in the Americas.
• Primarily the work of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the Monroe Doctrine forbade European interference in the American hemisphere but also asserted U.S. neutrality in regard to future European conflicts.
• The United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine to defend its increasingly imperialistic role in the Americas in the mid-19th century.
• The doctrine has had lasting impacts on U.S. relations with its southern neighbors, reflecting America's desire to assert its influence while advocating for independence and self-determination in the region.
• It was also a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy in the 19th century.

About Bluetongue Virus (BTV):

• It is responsible for causing the severe haemorrhagic disease, bluetongue (BT).
  • It is an infectious, non-contagious, vector-borne
  • It can infect domestic ruminants, including cattle, sheep, and goats, along with wild animals such as buffalo, deer, antelope, and camels.
  • Of the domestic species, sheep are the most severely affected.
• Transmission:
  • BTV is predominantly spread between ruminants through the bites of infected Culicoides midges, tiny blood-feeding insects that can be found in large numbers on most farms.
  • Some BTV strains can be transferred from a ruminant mother to her fetus during pregnancy.
• Can the BTV Spread to Humans?
  • BTV does not infect humans.
  • There are no food safety issues, and meat and dairy products are safe to consume.
• BT can result in high rates of morbidity and even mortality in flocks and herds and can affect production (e.g. milk yields) and trade.
• Treatment:
  • There is no effective treatment for bluetongue.
  • Vaccines are available for certain types of the disease and are used in Africa, Asia, and parts of Europe.

About Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay:

• Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, also known as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, was one of the greatest novelists and poets of India.
• He is famous as the author of Vande Mataram, the national song of India.
• His famous novels include Durgeshnandini, Kapalkundala (1866), Mrinalini (1869), Vishbriksha (1873), Chandrasekhar (1877), Rajani (1877), Rajsimha (1881), and Devi Chaudhurani (1884).
• Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's most famous novel was Anand Math (1882).
  • It was set in the background of the Sannyasi Rebellion in the late 18th century.
  • Anand Math contained the song “Vande Mataram”, which was later adopted as the national song.
    • The patriotic song was written in Sanskrit.
    • In the year 1896, Rabindranath Tagore sang this melodic poem for the first time at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress.
    • It was officially adopted as the national song by the Constituent Assembly of India on 24th January 1950.
  • He is often regarded as the “Sahitya Samrat” (Emperor of Literature) in Bengali literature.

About C-130J Super Hercules:

• It is a four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft.
• It was developed by Lockheed Martin, a US security and aerospace company.
• It is the US Air Force’s principal tactical cargo and personnel transport aircraft.
• It is the current variant of the C-130 Hercules.
• The largest operators are the US Air Force, US Marine Corps, Australia, Canada, India, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
• The Indian Air Force (IAF) currently operates 12 C-130J Super Hercules.
• Features:
  • The aircraft is capable of operating from rough, dirt strips and is the prime transport for airdropping troops and equipment into hostile areas.
  • It can accommodate a wide variety of oversized cargo, including everything from utility helicopters and six-wheeled armored vehicles to standard palletized cargo and military personnel.
  • Equipped with an Infrared Detection Set, the aircraft can perform precision low-level flying, airdrops, and landing in blackout conditions.

About INS Gharial:

• INS Gharial (L23) is a Magar-class amphibious warfare vessel of the Indian Navy.
• It is the second indigenously built Landing Ship Tank (Large).
• It was built by Hindustan Shipyard Limited and Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers.
• It is one of the largest ships of the Indian Navy.
• It was commissioned as a part of the Eastern Fleet under the Eastern Naval Command.
• It is capable of carrying helicopters and Landing Craft Assault (LCA).
• It is also armed with guns and rocket launchers.

About Sudden Stratospheric Warming event:

• It refers to a rapid rise in stratospheric temperatures that weakens or distorts the polar vortex (a cold-air mass typically stabilized over the Arctic).
• Occurrence of the event:
  • It begins with large-scale atmosphere waves (called Rossby waves) getting pushed higher into the atmosphere.
  • These waves can “break” (like waves in the ocean) on top of the polar vortex and weaken it.
  • If waves are strong enough, the winds of the polar vortex can weaken so much that they can reverse from being westerly to easterly.
  • This leads to cold air descending and warming rapidly.
  • It can lead to a displacement or splitting of the polar vortex, so instead of cold air being locked above the polar region, it can push further south into the mid-latitudes.

What is Polar Vortex?

• It is a large area of low pressure and cold air surrounding both of the Earth’s poles. 
• It extends from the tropopause (the dividing line between the stratosphere and troposphere) through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere.
• It always exists near the poles, but weakens in summer and strengthens in winter.
• Many times, during winter in the northern hemisphere, the polar vortex will expand, sending cold air southward with the jet stream.
  • Jet streams are relatively narrow bands of strong wind in the upper levels of the atmosphere.
• This occurs fairly regularly during wintertime and is often associated with large outbreaks of Arctic air in the United States.