Just like to welcome you all to the first day of this two day conference on mental health in India, bridging the gap,
and I just to say who it's sponsored by and then we will have the formal
welcome by the heads of House of St. Anthony's College and Somerville College.
Two of the is sponsoring this conference at the Oxford India Centre for Standard Sustainable Development
at Somerville College and the Asian Studies Centre at St. Antony's are sponsoring this conference,
which has been organised by Pramila Webster, UNEP, Johnny and myself.
And, of course, the rather Christian request, which has funded some part of this conference.
So I'd like to ask Baroness John Doyle to welcome you and followed by Professor Roger Goodman of St. Anthony.
Thank you very much indeed.
What a pleasure and an honour, I think it's a great title bridging the gap, but one, I think it's almost bridging the chasm.
There's so much work to be done in India, but also I would suggest in this country, as we know,
there are one in four people throughout the world who are experience or who will experience a mental health problem.
And the stats in the UK are similar. It's definitely a global problem.
Treatments are available. But but as we know, stigma has been an enormous problem.
It's something that in the UK, I think that we are getting to grips with the problem of stigma.
But I'm not so sure about India. I think it's a lovely phrase, which I noticed on the W.H.O. website, which says that whereas where there is neglect,
there is little or no understanding and where there's no understanding, that's neglect.
So India is a huge country, and it's no no wonder that there is a disparity between what happens in in different states in India.
But I think what's so great about this particular conference and why I welcome it, particularly,
is that it brings together both academics and practitioners because too often there's there's that there's not a gulf between them.
But I mean, there's no proper the interaction that we need between academics and practitioners.
But as I understand it,
there are also people who are coming to the conference who are people who actually have mental health problems and their families.
And to it not enough, do we take into consideration their views and their feelings.
So I'm really proud of a lot of work that's gone on in the UK in relation to mental health,
and I was one of the people I'm proud to say who who ensure that in legislation we adopted parity of esteem between mental health and physical health.
I have to say that it sounds great, but in practise it's not exactly working.
So what I would urge is that when you legislate in India in terms of mental health or anything else,
you make sure that the means are there to deliver what you want delivered.
And I think that sitting in any in the university, I'm acutely conscious of the fact that students,
certainly in the UK and I'm sure it's the same in India, are having increasing mental health problems.
And I was looking at some stats at Somerville a couple of days ago and the number of people.
We are a small college, 700 people altogether in terms of students and last year,
the number of students who sought help from our own internal welfare services.
This is not people who self referred to the university services was 194 and that have gone up from 150 the previous year.
So I think it's absolutely right and proper that we are meeting today in a university.
And whilst I know that you are going to be looking at this massive, massive issue in terms of India,
I hope that if not on this occasion, perhaps on some future occasion,
we can come together to look at the specific issues relating to students because the people that we are
educating today in our universities are probably the people who are going to lead our countries in the future.
And so we've got a duty to ensure that we try to ease their burdens.
I do think that mental health is one of the burdens. I'm really, really proud of that.
The Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development is a co-host for this important conference,
and I think that sustainability and health there are absolutely interlinked to mental
health must be dealt with in the same way with the same seriousness as physical health.
So thank you very much indeed for being here. Roger. Thank you, John.
I don't think I've ever actually had the experience of having two heads of colleges co-sponsoring an event before,
it's it's very exciting if something what the collective noun might be when all the heads of colleges the conference, right?
So I don't know. I don't know what too is, but but it's it's really thrilling to be able to do this together with with Somerville College.
And perhaps I could just spend a few minutes saying why.
And this is particularly pleased to be able to host an event like this in this particular building.
In case you're wondering about this building, this is the last building that Zaha Hadid, the very famous Iraqi born architect, actually opened.
It's opened about three years ago, three years ago, funded by the Invesco Company, which is why it's called the Invesco building.
And in fact, you probably also noticed that some fairly eclectic building on the stands in its site itself.
You'll be having lunch later, I think,
am I right in what we have come to fondly call the Hilda Books building because it is replacing what is known as the hill?
The best building, which is the very large concrete building at the centre of the college,
which we were forced to close down a few weeks ago because of various issues that need to be seriously dealt with and renovated in that building.
So welcome to St. Anthony. And normally I say a lot of things about St. Anthony, and I maybe said more or less what I want.
I've never had another head of college here, and we're very careful to get it absolutely accurate.
But I believe that we are the only Oxbridge college that was founded by a Frenchman.
I need to check that one, but I believe that to be the case is a very good story about that.
Actually, in the Anthony Invest's, who was the founder of Saint Hampton, is never actually intended to found a college in the UK.
He intended to found one in France.
And the story goes that when he went to meet the French Minister of Education in about 1946 47 in that wonderful way that French bureaucrats do.
He was kept waiting and he was kept waiting. He was kept waiting.
And the story was that after 45 minutes, he got up and walked out and he refused to ever go back again and look for somewhere else.
So every 17 days, we drink a host to the French bureaucracy and we say how wonderful it is that they behave like that.
So it's a true story. And he went to Cambridge after that, and they didn't quite work out how to do it,
and he ended up coming to Oxford and found it, sometimes in his college.
And so 19, his college has always been dedicated from the very beginning to the study of area studies looking at different regions of the world.
But it's had a very distinctive take on area studies, which I think is really held in good stead until today.
And that is that we see all areas studies is essentially being first of all, discipline based.
So all the academics, all the fellows who are at some time to also have a discipline hope.
I'm an anthropologist who works on Japan Flies, a historian who works on South Asia,
and we think it's incredibly important to have that discipline based,
both in theoretical terms and also methodological terms, so that we can actually then talk to our colleagues across the disciplinary areas we take.
We specialise in economics, politics, anthropology and sociology and history.
The second distinctive feature various studies in St. Anthony's and across the university is that it's
always been based on a really good local knowledge of the language and communities that we study.
So we're language based area studies. We don't believe you could do any work properly, for example, in my area, which is Japan,
that have very good understanding about the way the Japanese language works.
And so and we infuse this in all our students.
None of our students can do a master's degree or doctoral degree without having the language base and the local knowledge.
So almost all our research is based on going to do fieldwork in the countries that we work on or from which many of our students come.
Many students come from the areas that they work on.
Come here, get a perspective on it and then go back and do their research on those own communities.
Thirdly, our research is always implicitly comparative.
We think it's incredibly important that you understand the way one thing operates in one part of the world in terms of how it operates elsewhere.
And of course, the theme you have today is absolutely crucial when looking at mental health.
Mental health is understood very differently in very different parts of the world.
I've worked quite a lot on mental health issues in Japan,
and the understanding of the person and the relationship between the person and society is radically different to the way that it works,
for example, in the UK or in North American societies.
Until you get that concept of the person understood properly, you can understand how mental health institutions operate in those countries.
And I'm sure South Asia and India is exactly the same. You need to have those fundamental understandings of what is the concept of the
person and their relationship to society and their responsibilities to that society,
as well as the entitlements that they have from it.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly.
All the work that we've done, it's intense in this and various studies has always been practitioner focussed.
How can we take the ideas that we learnt in the academic academic environment out to the real world?
The practitioner world, all of us work with NGOs, U.N. agencies, local communities and governments.
And so we want our research to have an impact on the world out there.
And again, I can't think of a topic more important, as China's just said, than the one that you're addressing today.
So we're immensely proud to be hosting this two day workshop.
You know, it's an incredibly important topic. It's also an incredibly difficult one.
As I know from my own work looking at mental health issues in Japan. So I wish you luck because I think you're going to need some of that,
but I wish you all the best of what I'm sure will be a fabulous two day workshops.
Thank you very much.