WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT THERAPY AND ADVOCACY- WETA

WETA plugs loopholes of traditional gender-insensitive-psychological-therapies, promotes professional-sensitivity and caregiver-sensitivity towards consumers, a whole range of non-psychiatric-alternatives with or without psychiatric-medication as per client choice. It promotes economic-empowerment along with self-advocacy and sharing of recovery-stories. Scaling becomes possible via funding and human-power support from various Consumer/Corporate/Government/other-players/Psychiatrists/NGOs/ and Global-stakeholders SUPPORTING COMMUNITY-BASED-REHABILITATION.

1. ‘WETA’ is the woman-friendly, client-sensitive, confidence-inducing and economically-empowering-solution facilitating client-recovery.

2. This addresses the challenge question as posed at several levels:

• Dissemination: of information regarding WETA achieved via street plays, pamphlets, newspaper articles and talks. THOSE WHO CHOOSE PSYCHIATRIC MEDICATION SHALL ACCESS IT ALONG WITH ‘WETA’.
• Infrastructure-wise women in urban slums shall be targeted – via group work and organizing self-help groups.

For economically-poor women with mental illnesses - we create a website via Internet with a moderator and different people can send queries through e-mail to get answers. Also we create a WETA App for them.

These women whom we plan to target have access to technology like mobiles in the urban slums and can watch WETA-administration over women’s groups involving Questions about WETA being asked and answered plus stories of recovery via WETA shared via a website link which is part of demonstrations thus indicating an interactive and ownership-driven participatory method involving Stakeholders too with focus on awareness of empowerment-solutions facilitating recovery for women. Another page on the same website has an App-video-chat to facilitate around-the-clock interactions via sound, sight and touch [tactile-support] with counselling professionals.

C.    Training of professionals achieved via

• Developing and testing a WETA module
• Conducting workshops and eliciting people's/professionals' feedback-opinions of WETA via on-going and peer-group supervision.

D. We also hope to establish a help line and rescue team that will go to the victim's residence as soon as she telephones us to provide support systems to women.

E. Mobilizing Fund tapping resources: to scale via approaching funding agencies/ funding bodies/ corporate-companies/ establishment of linkages with grassroots NGO’S and other players globally.

3. Scaling of WETA enables personal recovery of psychosocially-challenged women all over the world via gender-sensitive-counselling and our tested-financial-empowerment model.

We lack proper woman-empowering therapeutic systems to solve problems of mentally-ill women across the world. E.g. the frustration-model or drive-theory [dealing with domestic violence and rape respectively] legitimizes male-violence. The victim is blamed while the offender goes Scott free. Also the body language and the general communication language of the professional don't inspire the client with the confidence to recover. Lack of adequate economic-empowerment, traditional-gender-stereotypes plus patriarchal-roadmaps used in counselling impede recovery. Women are treated as ‘therapeutic objects’, there is emphasis on over-medicalization and intra-psychic-change preventing them from receiving empathetic-humane and rights-based-treatment from professionals/caregivers, thus making recovery elusive.       

THIS ‘WETA’ MODEL will solve the above-mentioned problem because it:

• is based on 5 years of my sound PhD-research,
• is Evolved out of Professional and Insider-experience [I am a doctor who previously had Schizophrenia]
• Has been discussed in various conferences/seminars with leading lights in mental health globally,
• Is based on a mix-and-match of medication, user-survivor and feminist-expertize,
• Has an excellent livelihood-generation-component tested via grass-roots-COMMUNITY –BASED-REHABILITATION-WORK for a famous-Southern-Indian-rural-NGO,
• Has a good self-advocacy component too evolved out of my work as a global-self-advocate,
• Trains caregivers experiencing burn-out about what TO NOT DO!!!

Totally 10,000 psychosocially-challenged women from 10 poor-urban-slums each, of BANGALORE-KARNATAKA-INDIA plus other countries will improve psychosocially via  

• A good family-caregiver-environment plus emotional-support,
• Gaining decision making power on account of their earning status, their capacity to read/enter business contracts, use mathematics to keep financial records and be able to small run businesses - becoming an economic asset restores respect for these women in their families and communities feeding into social acceptance that in-turn feeds into mental-recovery thereby making recovery sustainable.
• Gaining confidence via sharing their success-stories DUE TO ‘WETA’ to become empowered self-advocates and community-role-models.    

track downloads in app store and/or count feedbacks via email on our internet account. - at least 1500 of targeted women-clients from each country - India, Ceylon, USA, Singapore and Canada download our app and interact with us via video-chat feedback sessions regarding family-support.

our community health workers make a survey of the number of our successful clients engaged in livelihoods-activities. AND Before-training and after-training scores on the SOFAS - Social and Occupational Functioning Scale of Psychological testing. - at least 1500 of targeted women from each of the above mentioned countries operate different kinds of businesses like petty shops or engage in any livelihood activity successfully.

we shall count number of success stories shared via our video-app during-story-sharing sessions. You can appoint any organization to also cross-monitor this project, its budget-spend and compliance, and check and issue formal Reports (interim and final). - at least 750 of targeted women from each of the above mentioned countries share stories of recovery via WETA with the community.

FOCUS ON WOMEN’S-MENTAL-HEALTH FROM AN EMPOWERMENT-RIGHTS-BASED-CLIENT-CENTERED-GENDER-SENSITIVE-PERSPECTIVE WITH LIVELIHOOD-CUM-SELF-ADVOCACY COMPONENTS ALL PUT TOGETHER IS INNOVATIVE and enables psychosocially-challenged women to recover in a way never done before. Regarding use of technological innovation, we’ll have a dedicated WETA web-page and design a consumer-friendly WETA APP with video-voice-cum-tactile support for consumers to have one-to-one interaction with our client-support-team providing counselling and distress-management-support round the clock. The clients from various global regions interact mutually to discuss and resolve issues via periodic video-chat interaction sessions and we as a team get to witness the unique operational dynamics of WETA in varied socio-economic scenarios.

This is the very area where we feel the technical strength of MIT needs to be put to best use. We wish to develop an App preferably using Android and IOS which is having an excellent interactive voice response like THE GOOGLE’S voice service as our client-community is very expressive and emotional. Hence the App needs to be less key-board-dependent and if tactile feedback is added that would make the App still more user-friendly and human-centered. Hence this would utilize the great technical expertise of the MIT team too. Our clients suffering from psychosocial-disability would be greatly helped.   

First, our web-based App will be made available in WINDOWS, MAC, LINUX and our mobile App will be a free App in ANDROID AND IOS for people to access our solution. Second, people can download our App via our website or App store. This is how our solution will be deployed. Third, it is affordable because it is freeware.  

I, DR.LAVANYA,

• Have authored a semi-autobiographical, women’s-mental-health-based, creative-literary-fiction-book capturing myriad realities pertaining to the politics of care which shall be marketed. I’ll invest the profit in mutual funds to partly fund GWRM.
• Shall link with local government bodies as also civil-society, philanthropy, business and tech-industry leaders for financial support.
• Shall approach corporate sectors to avail CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY FUNDING to get matching grants.  
• To ensure project sustenance at any cost, money obtained by the targeted women for financial-support would be a revolving fund wherein they return the money to self-help groups and another affected person in turn gets a loan/ financial-support to take up livelihood-activities. A Core-committee will be formed to operate bank-accounts where our women engage in bank-transactions plus manage on their own with our technical-guidance and monitoring-support. This core-committee is sustainable but the role of GWRM shall only be technical-support-provision and project-monitoring after sometime.

• Lack of caregiver-cooperation and support because of their difficulty in adapting to the special needs of their psychosocially-challenged wards.
• Psychosocial disabilities are long drawn and the caregiver experiences burnout. This also interferes with client-recovery but I have a solid caregiver-motivation-package as part of WETA to tackle this. 

I am not afraid of challenges though. Psychosocially challenged women are one among the most stigmatized and neglected sections of society. They are doubly disadvantaged on account of their disability and patriarchal-roadmaps and gender-stereotypes still being deployed in treatment settings. I will do everything I can to help them.    

http://www.centreforglobalmentalhealth.org/sites/www.centreforglobalmentalhealth.org/files/uploads/documents/1B%20Service%20user%20experience-%20Seshasayee.pdf

https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/06/personal-story-of-living-with-schizophrenia/

http://www.theweek.in/features/lifestyle/Myths-misconceptions-low-awareness-mental-illness-taboo-subject.html

SOLVE provides an exceptionally wonderful opportunity and platform to connect to players world-wide in starting work that we consider very crucial, necessary and relevant in today’s world. We are assured of your credibility and are especially challenged with and motivated by the need to develop critical-human-centered and socially-innovative and woman-friendly solutions with your help that can aid in developing a much more productive and responsible global citizenry. I, DR.LAVANYA, suffered in the past and nobody should have to undergo the same. My sincere desire is for madness to truly become a civilizational myth - THANK YOU!!!   

This is a new initiative and thereby we have no partners. We plan to link up with BASICNEEDS-UK, MOBILITY-INDIA and several other organizations having a positive, long standing impact and experience in community-based-rehabilitation in India and elsewhere.

1. THE RED DOOR,

2. THE BANYAN

3. THE GRAMEENA ABYUDAYA SEVA SAMSTHE [GASS]

[ALL IN INDIA].