Rethinking Mental Health Research in India: Exploring Methodological Challenges Through Critical Ethnographic Reflections from the Field

After being dominated by the positivist paradigm for a very long time, mental health research discourse globally is witnessing a paradigm shift. This is a conscious attempt to contextualise lived experience, moving beyond its overdependence on the biomedical model. Such a paradigm shift requires mental health researchers to use qualitative, participatory, and rights-based research approaches to provide space to the participants’ voices. Such a shift also needs the researcher to be critically reflexive, acknowledging the hierarchies in the researcher–participant relationship and the context of participants’ lives. In this chapter, adopting a critical reflexive research approach, we draw upon the reflections from the first author’s research with male survivors of intimate partner violence in Kerala, India, to examine the methodological challenges, the insider–outsider negotiations, the discomfort of cultural silence, the ethical readjustments, and the emotional labour of carrying the weight of the stories encountered and discuss how the researcher could or could not navigate these challenges.