Templeton Foundation grant awarded to CAMHRA anthropologist for global training in religion and mental health
The John Templeton Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant to Dr Bhrigupati Singh, Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA) at SOAS University of London and Swayam Bagaria, Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), to create a new global, research-based training programme on anthropology of mental health and religion for mental health practitioners around the world, titled Ethnos-MH.
Mental health associations worldwide have emphasised the need to develop religion and spirituality (R/S) training for mental health practitioners to better understand the many ways in which it matters for mental health outcomes.
What is currently needed are more careful, experience-near understandings of how religion and spiritual experiences matter for mental health outcomes.
Ethnos-MH aims to fill this gap by introducing psychiatrists, counsellors, lived experience practitioners, psychologists, social workers, and other mental health practitioners to ethnographic approaches that illuminate the everyday connections between psychological wellbeing and religious and spiritual life—how people employ religious and spiritual practices, kinship networks, local ecologies, and ontologically diverse healing traditions to navigate illness and distress.
Dr Singh and Dr Bagaria said: “At present, the gap is not between science and religion as adversarial frameworks for addressing mental health issues. As practitioners across the world have long emphasized, mental health practice is both an art and a science. We believe that what is currently needed are more careful, experience-near understandings of how religion and spiritual experiences matter for mental health outcomes. We see anthropology as an ideal bridge to address this need, by bringing diverse disciplinary orientations, regional expertise, and knowledge systems together, to help make mental health practice more attuned to the religious and spiritual texture of people’s lives globally.”
To build a more inclusive and globally adaptable training program, Ethnos-MH will be piloted over a three-year period (2026-2028) at SOAS-CAMHRA, University of London; Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) New Delhi. These three leading institutions bring together a wide range of disciplines, allowing the program to be tested and refined across different professional environments.
Professor David Mosse and Dr Nikita Simpson, Co-Directors of CAMHRA added: “Ethnos-MH captures the primary objective of CAMHRA: to contribute novel concepts in anthropological thought and research to the practice of mental health care. We are delighted to host this path breaking initiative in partnership with the Harvard Divinity School.”
Funded by a grant from the UKRI, the Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA) is a globally oriented and locally connected hub for cutting-edge anthropological research, education and public engagement on mental health.
