Founder – Anjali

Ratnaboli Ray

Ratnaboli Ray has been a mental health advocate almost all her life, from the time in her childhood, when she understood, through experiences at home, that people with mental illness were treated differently. It led her to study Clinical Psychology and further train in Human Rights and Health from Harvard School of Public Health and Hygiene to work with people with mental health conditions and psycho-social disabilities. She ventured into the untouchable world of government mental hospitals over two decades ago and in 1999 received an Ashoka Fellowship to start Anjali. Anjali’s thrust is twofold – one, to establish Mental Illness within the mainstream health paradigm of India and two, to ‘speak for’ a large population of marginalized people with mental illness vis-a-vis their right to a professional and inclusive system of care and treatment. In the last 18 years Anjali has impacted people through its social inclusion, capacity-building and livelihoods programmes in government mental hospitals. Abandoned people have been reintegrated with their families, through a complex process of community tracing and advocacy with caregivers and State mechanisms like the police, Panchayat, Municipalities and the Welfare, Health and Women & Child departments of the government. A trainer on gender, sexuality, disability and mental health issues, more recently, Ratnaboli has been an invitee member in the drafting of the Mental Health Care Act of 2017, is part of the Rules Framing Committee of the Govt of West Bengal and is now deeply invested in a national campaign called Bridge The Care Gap which will advocate for the inclusion of mental health as a health and development priority of all major political parties in the country. She was the first Indian woman to receive the Alison Des Forges Award in 2016 for Extraordinary Activism from Human Rights Watch, USA, in 2016.