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Just like to welcome you all to the first day of this two day conference on mental health in India, bridging the gap,

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and I just to say who it's sponsored by and then we will have the formal

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welcome by the heads of House of St. Anthony's College and Somerville College.

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Two of the is sponsoring this conference at the Oxford India Centre for Standard Sustainable Development

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at Somerville College and the Asian Studies Centre at St. Antony's are sponsoring this conference,

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which has been organised by Pramila Webster, UNEP, Johnny and myself.

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And, of course, the rather Christian request, which has funded some part of this conference.

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So I'd like to ask Baroness John Doyle to welcome you and followed by Professor Roger Goodman of St. Anthony.

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Thank you very much indeed.

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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.

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There's so much work to be done in India, but also I would suggest in this country, as we know,

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there are one in four people throughout the world who are experience or who will experience a mental health problem.

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And the stats in the UK are similar. It's definitely a global problem.

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Treatments are available. But but as we know, stigma has been an enormous problem.

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It's something that in the UK, I think that we are getting to grips with the problem of stigma.

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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,

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there is little or no understanding and where there's no understanding, that's neglect.

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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.

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But I think what's so great about this particular conference and why I welcome it, particularly,

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is that it brings together both academics and practitioners because too often there's there's that there's not a gulf between them.

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But I mean, there's no proper the interaction that we need between academics and practitioners.

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But as I understand it,

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there are also people who are coming to the conference who are people who actually have mental health problems and their families.

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And to it not enough, do we take into consideration their views and their feelings.

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So I'm really proud of a lot of work that's gone on in the UK in relation to mental health,

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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.

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I have to say that it sounds great, but in practise it's not exactly working.

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So what I would urge is that when you legislate in India in terms of mental health or anything else,

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you make sure that the means are there to deliver what you want delivered.

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And I think that sitting in any in the university, I'm acutely conscious of the fact that students,

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certainly in the UK and I'm sure it's the same in India, are having increasing mental health problems.

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And I was looking at some stats at Somerville a couple of days ago and the number of people.

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We are a small college, 700 people altogether in terms of students and last year,

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the number of students who sought help from our own internal welfare services.

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This is not people who self referred to the university services was 194 and that have gone up from 150 the previous year.

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So I think it's absolutely right and proper that we are meeting today in a university.

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And whilst I know that you are going to be looking at this massive, massive issue in terms of India,

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I hope that if not on this occasion, perhaps on some future occasion,

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we can come together to look at the specific issues relating to students because the people that we are

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educating today in our universities are probably the people who are going to lead our countries in the future.

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And so we've got a duty to ensure that we try to ease their burdens.

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I do think that mental health is one of the burdens. I'm really, really proud of that.

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The Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development is a co-host for this important conference,

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and I think that sustainability and health there are absolutely interlinked to mental

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health must be dealt with in the same way with the same seriousness as physical health.

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So thank you very much indeed for being here. Roger. Thank you, John.

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I don't think I've ever actually had the experience of having two heads of colleges co-sponsoring an event before,

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it's it's very exciting if something what the collective noun might be when all the heads of colleges the conference, right?

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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.

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And perhaps I could just spend a few minutes saying why.

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And this is particularly pleased to be able to host an event like this in this particular building.

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In case you're wondering about this building, this is the last building that Zaha Hadid, the very famous Iraqi born architect, actually opened.

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It's opened about three years ago, three years ago, funded by the Invesco Company, which is why it's called the Invesco building.

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And in fact, you probably also noticed that some fairly eclectic building on the stands in its site itself.

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You'll be having lunch later, I think,

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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?

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The best building, which is the very large concrete building at the centre of the college,

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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.

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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.

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I've never had another head of college here, and we're very careful to get it absolutely accurate.

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But I believe that we are the only Oxbridge college that was founded by a Frenchman.

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I need to check that one, but I believe that to be the case is a very good story about that.

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Actually, in the Anthony Invest's, who was the founder of Saint Hampton, is never actually intended to found a college in the UK.

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He intended to found one in France.

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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.

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He was kept waiting and he was kept waiting. He was kept waiting.

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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.

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So every 17 days, we drink a host to the French bureaucracy and we say how wonderful it is that they behave like that.

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So it's a true story. And he went to Cambridge after that, and they didn't quite work out how to do it,

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and he ended up coming to Oxford and found it, sometimes in his college.

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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.

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But it's had a very distinctive take on area studies, which I think is really held in good stead until today.

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And that is that we see all areas studies is essentially being first of all, discipline based.

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So all the academics, all the fellows who are at some time to also have a discipline hope.

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I'm an anthropologist who works on Japan Flies, a historian who works on South Asia,

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and we think it's incredibly important to have that discipline based,

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both in theoretical terms and also methodological terms, so that we can actually then talk to our colleagues across the disciplinary areas we take.

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We specialise in economics, politics, anthropology and sociology and history.

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The second distinctive feature various studies in St. Anthony's and across the university is that it's

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always been based on a really good local knowledge of the language and communities that we study.

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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,

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that have very good understanding about the way the Japanese language works.

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And so and we infuse this in all our students.

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None of our students can do a master's degree or doctoral degree without having the language base and the local knowledge.

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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.

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Many students come from the areas that they work on.

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Come here, get a perspective on it and then go back and do their research on those own communities.

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Thirdly, our research is always implicitly comparative.

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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.

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And of course, the theme you have today is absolutely crucial when looking at mental health.

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Mental health is understood very differently in very different parts of the world.

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I've worked quite a lot on mental health issues in Japan,

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and the understanding of the person and the relationship between the person and society is radically different to the way that it works,

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for example, in the UK or in North American societies.

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Until you get that concept of the person understood properly, you can understand how mental health institutions operate in those countries.

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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

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person and their relationship to society and their responsibilities to that society,

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as well as the entitlements that they have from it.

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And finally, and perhaps most importantly.

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All the work that we've done, it's intense in this and various studies has always been practitioner focussed.

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How can we take the ideas that we learnt in the academic academic environment out to the real world?

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The practitioner world, all of us work with NGOs, U.N. agencies, local communities and governments.

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And so we want our research to have an impact on the world out there.

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And again, I can't think of a topic more important, as China's just said, than the one that you're addressing today.

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So we're immensely proud to be hosting this two day workshop.

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You know, it's an incredibly important topic. It's also an incredibly difficult one.

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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,

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but I wish you all the best of what I'm sure will be a fabulous two day workshops.

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Thank you very much.