Jayasree Kalathil, PhD

Jayasree has encountered mental health services in India and in the UK. Most of her adult life was spent negotiating six different psychiatric diagnoses, western medicine, faith and religious healing. The net result of this was that she developed a political identity as a survivor, with strong views on healing and recovery, and what it means to remain well.

Trained in literary/cultural studies, with a Ph.D. from the CIEFL, Hyderabad, India, Jayasree's academic work on madness and mental health started with an invitation to present a paper at the first national seminar on women and mental health in India. This work looked at women’s writing and how they used narrative space to talk about their distress. Her field work with women service users in Pune consolidated her interest in user narratives and their political potential in rethinking mental health and psychiatric services. Her subsequent work focused on media and cultural representations of madness, family and gender issues, and the rights of people who have been diagnosed mad.

Before moving to England, Jayasree worked with Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies, Hyderabad, and Bapu Trust for Research on Mind and Discourse, Pune, where she was the founding editor of aaina, India’s first and only mental health advocacy newsletter. In London, she has worked with Mental Health Media on the anti-discrimination project, Open Up. Later, she worked with the Breaking the Circles of Fear team on the Race Equality Education and Training project with the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health. For the last three years, she has worked closely the Afiya Trust, serving as the interim project manager of Catch-a-Fiya, a network for service users and survivors from BME communities, and of the BME Advocacy Project.

Jayasree currently serves as the Co-Chair of the Social Perspectives Network, and on the advisory groups of the Oxford Trial Evaluation of Community Treatment Orders (OCTET) at the Oxford University and of the National BME Mental Health Advocacy Project at the Afiya Trust in London.

She has published several articles, reports and book chapters, both in India and in the UK (see the publications section for some of her work). She is the author of a children's book, The Sack-cloth Man, published by DC Books in 2009. She is a published poet and also enjoys translating literary works from Malayalam, her mother tongue, to English.

Jayasree has been an active participant in the women’s movement in India. She finds that the involvement in mental health politics and the service user/survivor movement is an essential part of her recovery. Growing organic vegetables in the small back garden of her South London house, which she shares with her husband, has become an equally important element in her well-being these days.