This essay plan should be no more than two double-spaced, typed, A4 pages, in which you include your title, the main points you will discuss, outline the structure of your argument, and provide an indicative bibliography (i.e. a list of the key texts you intend to use for the essay).
I submitted a formative assignment which I have attached below. This is the feedback I received.
I would strongly advise having a question rather than a title so you can be confident you have answered that question when you read back over your essay. This could be ‘What are the ethical and methodological challenges for MH interventions in urban communities in India, and the implications for health justice?’ This is quite a long question, so you could potentially simplify it if you wish. Otherwise, make sure you cover everything promised by the question.
Make sure in the essay you bring your reader with you – why does rapid urbanisation mean it is especially important for India to invest in MH? What changes in lifestyle are drivers for this need? What was/is the MH healthcare landscape?
Don’t limit your analysis to only barriers – what facilitators are there to MH treatment in urban India that you encounter as you read?
Before jumping into ethical challenges in implementing MH interventions, I’d advise providing a bit of an overview of India, urbanisation, current MH treatment landscape (esp given it’s a society with two dominant healthcare systems), to provide context.
Perhaps give some space to explaining what MH interventions are and their relationship to MH healthcare provision.
Literacy should not be a barrier to informed consent – the barrier is intervention developers/researchers not taking sufficient care to ensure it.
But there’s something interesting here about the very concept of ‘mental health’ itself when you say that a barrier to intervention success is ‘a lack of understanding of mental health’. How has emotional distress been framed and understood in the past? In what ways is the concept of ‘mental health’ complimentary to or in conflict with this? There’s a lot of critical psychiatry in the global mental health field you may find useful on this.
This is particularly key if you’re interested in intervention adaptation and whether and how interventions are adapted to new settings, inc cultural sensitivity.
One way to think about this essay at a structural level might be the utility of dividing the essay along lines of ethics and methodology: quite a lot of the ethical issues struck me as ones that could equally be considered methodological, given how intertwined methods and ethics are. Would it be worth playing with organising your essay into sections along more thematic lines and then exploring methods and ethics together?
Think about flow – might it be useful for the reader to know about lack of data on MH and thus the challenges of identifying needs and developing relevant interventions before questions of stigma (ie design before implementation)?
Try not to introduce new material into the conclusion: let your conclusion be the tying together of the section conclusions. I would strongly advise having a question rather than a title so you can be confident you have answered that question when you read back over your essay. This could be ‘What are the ethical and methodological challenges for MH interventions in urban communities in India, and the implications for health justice?’ This is quite a long question, so you could potentially simplify it if you wish. Otherwise, make sure you cover everything promised by the question.
Make sure in the essay you bring your reader with you – why does rapid urbanisation mean it is especially important for India to invest in MH? What changes in lifestyle are drivers for this need? What was/is the MH healthcare landscape?
Don’t limit your analysis to only barriers – what facilitators are there to MH treatment in urban India that you encounter as you read?
Before jumping into ethical challenges in implementing MH interventions, I’d advise providing a bit of an overview of India, urbanisation, current MH treatment landscape (esp given it’s a society with two dominant healthcare systems), to provide context.
Perhaps give some space to explaining what MH interventions are and their relationship to MH healthcare provision.
Literacy should not be a barrier to informed consent – the barrier is intervention developers/researchers not taking sufficient care to ensure it.
But there’s something interesting here about the very concept of ‘mental health’ itself when you say that a barrier to intervention success is ‘a lack of understanding of mental health’. How has emotional distress been framed and understood in the past? In what ways is the concept of ‘mental health’ complimentary to or in conflict with this? There’s a lot of critical psychiatry in the global mental health field you may find useful on this.
This is particularly key if you’re interested in intervention adaptation and whether and how interventions are adapted to new settings, inc cultural sensitivity.
One way to think about this essay at a structural level might be the utility of dividing the essay along lines of ethics and methodology: quite a lot of the ethical issues struck me as ones that could equally be considered methodological, given how intertwined methods and ethics are. Would it be worth playing with organising your essay into sections along more thematic lines and then exploring methods and ethics together?
Think about flow – might it be useful for the reader to know about lack of data on MH and thus the challenges of identifying needs and developing relevant interventions before questions of stigma (ie design before implementation)?
Try not to introduce new material into the conclusion: let your conclusion be the tying together of the section conclusions.
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|