India needs rigorously tested, culturally adapted cognitive behavioural therapy

Abstract

As of 2017, the Global Burden of Disease study estimated that approximately one in seven people living across 29 states in India were affected by mental illness.1 Some challenges that were highlighted were the mental health treatment gap, the need for community-based psychological interventions, and the need for cultural adaptation of psychological interventions like cognitive therapies, keeping in mind the existing plurality in approaches to treatment. Beck and colleagues2 emphasised the need for increased acceptance of, and access to, culturally adapted models of cognitive behavioural therapy as a potential solution to the vast unmet mental health treatment gap in low-income and middle-income countries.