About Whispers of Care
Whispers of Care is a living digital archive that brings together stories, reflections, and zines emerging from mental health care settings in India. The archive grows out of ethnographic engagement with psychiatric hospitals, halfway homes, and community mental health programmes, and is attentive to the everyday practices through which care is enacted, negotiated, resisted, and endured.
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Rather than offering definitive accounts of mental health care, Whispers of Care holds fragments, fieldnotes, narratives, visual-textual experiments, and testimonies that often remain undocumented or softened within institutional records. These materials trace how care unfolds in ordinary moments, shaped by constraint, surveillance, ethical contradictions, and acts of survival.
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The archive centres the experiences of people who use mental health services, while also engaging with the perspectives and dilemmas of those who provide care. It treats silence, refusal, and partial telling not as gaps to be filled, but as meaningful features of institutional life.
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Whispers of Care is intended as an evolving space. New materials may be added over time, and the archive remains open to change, revision, and critique.
About the creator
This archive is assembled by Neha Jain, a psychologist and researcher trained in critical mental health approaches. She is a doctoral scholar of psychology at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Her work explores the nature of care and recovery across diverse mental health care settings.
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Her engagement with psychiatric hospitals, halfway homes, and community mental health programmes has shaped the materials gathered here, as have the relationships, constraints, and ethical negotiations of fieldwork.
The archive reflects a situated perspective rather than a comprehensive account.
A note on the archive
Whispers of Care is not a comprehensive repository, nor a platform for advocacy claims. It is an attempt to hold space for forms of knowledge that are often difficult to articulate, circulate, or sustain, especially within systems that demand clarity, compliance, and resolution.
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Readers are invited to engage with the archive at their own pace.