Youth Mental Health and the Individualisation of Wellbeing in Indian Schools: Evidence from the 2025 Adolescent Leadership Summit in New Delhi

Technical Summary: Youth Mental Health and the Individualisation of Wellbeing in Indian Schools

Problem Statement
Despite the intensification of public concern regarding youth mental health in India—driven by academic pressure, digital mediation, and socioeconomic uncertainty—there is a significant gap in understanding how schools conceptualize these issues and what forms of support they actually operationalize. While policy frameworks (e.g., the National Education Policy, Mental Healthcare Act 2017, and Supreme Court guidelines) advocate for a holistic, relational, and institutional approach to student wellbeing, it remains unclear how these expansive mandates translate into daily school practice. Specifically, there is a lack of empirical evidence on whether schools address the structural and environmental origins of distress or if they inadvertently shift the burden of regulation onto the individual student.

Methodology
This study employs a qualitative case study design centered on the 2025 Adolescent Leadership Summit in New Delhi. The research analyzed data from 110 participating schools (representing over 200,000 students) which showcased mental health and wellbeing initiatives at the event's central feature, the Swasthya Sangam (Health and Wellbeing Gathering).

• Data Collection: The corpus included multimodal data collected over three days: photographs and video recordings of exhibits, written artefacts (posters, manuals, pamphlets), and fieldnotes from participant and non-participant observations.
• Sampling: The sample consisted of self-selected schools favorably disposed to mental health initiatives. While not statistically representative of all Indian schools, the sample captured a wide cultural, linguistic, regional, and economic range, including institutions from urban, tribal, and southern regions.
• Analysis: The researchers utilized Content Configuration Analysis (CCA), a qualitative approach that examines how elements combine into configurations of meaning. The analysis proceeded in two distinct stages:
  1. Conceptualisation: Coding how mental health and wellbeing were framed and described across exhibits.
  2. Enactment: Coding the specific strategies and techniques demonstrated by students to address these issues.
• Trustworthiness: Credibility was established through triangulation across data modes and multiple school instances. Dependability was ensured via an audit trail of coding decisions.

Key Results
The study reveals a stark divergence between the breadth of conceptual understanding and the narrowness of practical application.

1. Broad Conceptual Architecture: Schools presented a multidimensional understanding of mental health and wellbeing, organized into four domains:

   • Everyday Wellbeing: Framed as ongoing development involving emotional awareness, positivity, and relationships, integrated into school routines.
   • Prevention: Focused on identifying emerging risks (e.g., cyberbullying, academic stress) through awareness and skill-building.
   • Intervention: Described as a layered system involving peer mentors, teachers, parents, and professional counselors.
   • Recovery: Envisioned as supportive spaces (e.g., wellness rooms) for reflection and emotional expression.

2. Narrow Repertoire of Practice: Despite the broad conceptual framework, the actual strategies demonstrated converged on a limited set of self-directed techniques. These practices consistently located the responsibility for wellbeing within the individual, regardless of the collective context. The strategies fell into three categories:

   • Cognitive-Affective Self-Help: Using models (e.g., emotion charts, cognitive triangles) to identify, interpret, and reframe internal states.
   • Embodied Self-Care: Regulating physiological states through sensory engagement (e.g., breathing exercises, "mind calmer" bottles, tactile objects).
   • Relational Self-Management: Approaching relationships through value-oriented conduct (e.g., peer mentoring, empathy exercises) where the individual is tasked with regulating their own conduct within the relationship.

Key Contributions

• Empirical Gap Filling: The study provides rare empirical evidence on how Indian schools publicly present and operationalize mental health support, moving beyond policy texts to examine "idealized self-presentation" in practice.
• Conceptual-Practice Dissonance: It identifies a critical gap where schools articulate a relational, institutional vision of wellbeing but operationalize it through individualized, self-regulatory strategies.
• Contextual Re-evaluation of Critique: The paper challenges the direct transposition of Global North critiques of "individualisation" and "therapeutic education" onto the Indian context. It argues that while these strategies may function as "responsibilisation" in liberal contexts, in the Indian context—characterized by strong familial and communal obligations—they may simultaneously offer a novel space for self-articulation and agency that traditional relational framings often suppress.

Significance and Claims
The authors argue that the convergence on self-directed strategies is ambivalent. On one hand, these tools provide students with accessible vocabulary for distress and foster agency. On the other hand, they risk obscuring the structural origins of distress (e.g., educational competition, digital comparison, labor market uncertainty) by framing solutions solely as matters of individual coping and regulation.

The paper does not claim that current approaches should be discarded. Instead, it posits that the task for Indian schools is to align their operational practices with their broad conceptual architectures. This involves situating self-help and self-care within the wider support networks (teachers, families, institutional policies) that schools already envision. The ultimate goal is to help students not only cope with pressures but also recognize their social and institutional origins, thereby addressing the root causes of distress rather than merely managing its symptoms. The study concludes that while schools are making significant commitments, the broader ecosystem (universities, workplaces) remains a neglected site for such infrastructure, necessitating a shift from individual coping to collective, institutional adaptation.