Byline: G. Swaminath Dear Friends, It is with immense gratitude and not without some pride that I stand before all of you (some of you have been my teachers and mentors) to deliver the presidential address of the Indian Psychiatric Society, South Zone, for the year 2014-15. I thank all of you who have had the faith to elevate me to this exalted position. It is customary to deliver the presidential address on a topic of academic interest or personal passion. Today I would like to take this opportunity to take you through my voyage of working with disadvantaged populations, and trying to overcome the challenges faced. This has been a sojourn of almost two decades and a major part of my professional life and I think it is time to share the joys and sorrows of my journey with professional colleagues. Many professional colleagues and friends have been co-travelers in this voyage and have assisted me on the way. While it would be almost impossible to name all, I start off with a humble heartfelt 'THANK YOU' to them, indeed very many of you right here, for being my source of guidance and strength at various junctures in this wonderful journey. An Awakening of Sorts My first contact with the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM) at Heggadadevanakote started in 1995 December, when Dr. R Balasubramaniam, Founder President took us around the various campuses spread over a 20 km radius and made us familiar with the activities of this organization. The SVYM was started in 1984 by a group of young doctors, just after their medical college, who settled in one of the most impoverished talukas that is Heggadadevanakote (HDKote), Mysore District, which has a large forest area and is part of the Nagarahole forest range and Niligiri bioreserve. The inundation of the forest after the construction of the Kabini dam as well as cordoning of the forest for preservation as a National park and the improper rehabilitation left the tribals helpless. They were denied their right to livelihood, ancestral place, food habits, customs and the moving into rural areas from the forest affected their ways of retaining their culture and tradition values. SVYM took the cause of these twice displaced as well as dispossessed tribals and assisted them in their felt needs of health, education and community development. Before I go further I would like to brief all of you about the health initiatives by the organisation. The first two years I worked in Hosahalli, a tribal haadi in the middle of the forest, and later at Kenchanahalli, a village on the outskirts of the forest, as more people could access psychiatric help. SVYM had a primary care centre here, earlier called Shankara Community care centre, with 10 beds which drew patients from nearby villages and the forest. However in 1998 the psychiatric camp shifted to Sargur, a commercial town in the backward taluk of HDKote where the 90 bed Vivekananda Memorial Hospital (VMH), had been built. VMH offers multi-specialty secondary care at an affordable cost to the rural and tribal populace and draws its clients from all over Mysore district. It is affiliated to the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGUHS), Bangalore and offers the India's first post-graduate fellowship course in HIV medicine for medical and dental professionals. The Community based services related to health are provided by SVYM through the outreach program called ROHINI (Rural oriented health initiative) and a network of grassroot level health workers called health facilitators. Their HIV control programmes, that offers comprehensive, inclusive and end-to-end care, is rated as one of the best in the country and has been hailed as a best-practice model by UNAIDS. SVYM's key focus areas have been-tribal and rural health, ayurveda (the Indian system of medicine), reproductive and child health, hygiene and sanitation, care and control of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and blindness. …