Manas Foundation, a New Delhi-based registered trust, was founded in 2000 by a group of mental health professionals in response to their experience of the growing need for community-based mental healthcare.

Manas Foundation is one of GFA’s partners. Their team will be providing carrier counseling sessions to youths of Savda who will attend vocational training classes. In the meantime, Manas conducted series of workshop in Savda Ghevra during the past few weeks. The workshops aimed at better understanding the issues of mental health in community.  

What is the importance of goal settings ? How do we decide which means to use to achieve an end ? How context and environment play significant roles in our actions and decisions ? How different do young girls feel about work they do ? What women feel about being happy, conflict resolution and so on. All these topics were discussed with more than 150 community members and helped understand their problem solving approach.

Workshops were conducted in January 2010 with various groups : young male adults, young female adults, older women and Child Survival India’s staff, our implementing health project partner in Savda ghevra.  Who would have thought, a game of Bull’s eye could generate such valuable insights about our self! Participants in each group were asked to hit at various circles drawn on a board which were assigned points. While doing so, they had freedom to choose their standing point. While most of the participants hit at the smaller, inner circle which incidentally also had maximum number of points, few continued to aim at the circle even after misses. Some got affected by laughter of other participants after being missed the target; some were too focused to be affected by what other people did.

The discussion that followed helped participants understand that we often set unrealistic goals for ourselves without assessing our own capabilities. Goal setting is decided most of the time by what people around us think we should do. Sometimes we set unrealistic goals only to prove point to others. We also frequently fail to decide which means is the most appropriate to achieve our goal. At times, we continue to prefer the tougher path in spite of failure because we feel that choosing an easier path would make us laughing stock of people around us. Thus we fail to assess our own capacity and potential.

It was interesting to see that unlike boys, many young girls of Savda did not think much while aiming the target in the game. It also reflects on how they perceive their life in reality. Many said that they did not aim at any particular circle; they would have been happy if it had hit anywhere. There were also few who said that they concentrated hard and were happy even if the target hit was not the inner circle because something was better than nothing.

With women in Savda the focus of workshop was different. The aim was to understand how they felt about the problems in the colony, how they could be solved, if those problems disappeared would they then become happy; what does happiness mean to them and so on. It wasn’t surprising to see that women surrounded by so many problems couldn’t express what they liked. Most of them said that they liked doing household work; and few liked watching serials. But expressing what liking meant was a tedious task.

Child survival India’s team benefited immensely from the exercise where they were able to discuss their own prejudices while dealing with community health problems. For them interacting with Manas Foundation team was an important thing as it gave them an exposure to problems related to mental health.

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