Dr. Amit Malik, Founder & CEO of Amaha, on Building an Integrated Mental Healthcare System in India

India’s mental healthcare ecosystem is at a critical inflection point. While awareness has grown and digital access has expanded, gaps remain in continuity, quality, and structured long-term care, particularly for individuals requiring intensive clinical support. Bridging these gaps requires systems that integrate prevention, outpatient treatment, digital interventions, and inpatient care into a coherent whole.

Dr Amit Malik, Founder and CEO of Amaha, has spent nearly a decade building exactly such a model. With the launch of Amaha’s new mental health hospital in Bengaluru, the organisation is taking a significant step toward redefining how mental healthcare is delivered in India, placing clinical governance, dignity, and continuity at the centre of recovery. In this conversation, Dr. Malik shares insights on the structural gaps in India’s mental health delivery system, the role of private organisations in strengthening public healthcare efforts, and how hybrid, person-first models can improve long-term outcomes while making care more accessible, ethical, and sustainable.

1. Amaha’s new Mental Health Hospital in Bangalore comes at a crucial time for India’s healthcare ecosystem. What larger gap in the country’s mental health delivery system does this facility aim to fill?

When we started Amaha nine years ago, one gap was immediately clear: India didn’t have a system that could support people through the full arc of their recovery. Care was fragmented. People delayed seeking help because of stigma, and even when they did, they encountered inconsistent quality, limited evidence-based practice, unpredictable costs, and almost no coordination between digital support, outpatient care, and hospitalisation. Our vision has always been to change this by building an integrated continuum of care. Over time, we connected digital tools, therapy, psychiatry, and teleconsultations. The inpatient hospital is the next step in creating a seamless pathway.

The other gap we saw was the quality of inpatient care itself. Even where services existed, they were often inconsistent: limited clinical governance, weak multidisciplinary coordination, and environments that did little to support recovery. We wanted to raise the baseline for what safe, structured, evidence-based inpatient mental healthcare in India should look like. Our hospital brings together psychiatrists, therapists, nurses, and allied specialists working with shared protocols, real clinical supervision, and a predictable, transparent approach to care. The environment is deliberately therapeutic rather than institutional because dignity, structure, and emotional safety are essential to recovery, not add-ons.

With nine outpatient centres and now a 27-bed hospital, we’re building capacity where it is urgently needed and creating a model that can be replicated. The goal is to show that high-quality, coordinated care is not aspirational in India, it should be the minimum standard.

2. Mental health care often lacks structured, long-term support options. How does Amaha’s inpatient hospital model bring continuity and coordination to the mental healthcare journey?

One of the most persistent challenges in mental healthcare is the lack of structured continuity across levels of care. Patients often navigate fragmented systems, moving from self-care to therapy to psychiatry to hospital admissions without integrated follow-up or planned transitions.

Amaha’s hospital model was built to bridge these systemic gaps. It’s designed as a continuum, not a standalone service, integrated with our OPDs, a teleconsultation network of 200+ clinicians and 100+ workplace and institutional partners. These channels work in tandem: clinicians can route individuals to the hospital for short-term stabilisation, rehabilitation, or complex psychiatric care, and the hospital team ensures a planned transition back into outpatient or online care with no break in treatment.

3. The private mental healthcare space is still nascent in India. What operational principles guide Amaha in ensuring clinical excellence while keeping care accessible and affordable?

Private mental healthcare in India is still evolving, and for Amaha, the way to build both clinical excellence and accessibility is by grounding everything in a strong philosophy. At the centre of this is a person-first approach, recognising that a diagnosis is only one part of someone’s story, and designing plans that account for their relationships, responsibilities, financial realities, and pace of recovery.

This is held together by decades of expertise and experience: 200+ clinicians across specialisations who work in shared loops with structured supervision, common protocols, and continuous review. Whether someone is seeing a senior psychiatrist, a newer therapist, or entering care for the first time, the depth of the full team sits behind every decision, ensuring safety, quality, and consistency across digital, outpatient, and inpatient settings.

At the same time, we anchor our operations in principles that make care human and sustainable: empathy, trust, hope, and independence. This shows up in everyday details: adapting to a person’s comfort and mobility needs, being transparent and reliable at every touchpoint, guiding families alongside clients, and communicating clearly about treatment plans, risks, and expectations. We hold realistic optimism for those who may struggle to believe recovery is possible, and we treat every client as an active participant rather than a passive recipient of care. Even in complex situations, including involuntary admissions, we preserve autonomy wherever possible, ensuring people feel respected, informed, and safe.

These principles shape how we design services, how we deliver care and how we support individuals through recovery, allowing us to deliver high-quality care while keeping it accessible, grounded, and truly person-centred in a sector that is still finding its footing.

4. In recent years, India’s corporate sector has begun prioritising employee well-being. How is Amaha integrating its clinical expertise into workplace mental health programmes to create measurable outcomes for organisations?

Indian organisations are moving from basic awareness to expecting workplace mental health programmes that deliver measurable impact.

Today, we work with 100+ organisations across technology, manufacturing, retail, education, BFSI, logistics, and healthcare. Every intervention is anchored in a validated clinical framework. Our assessments, triage pathways, and escalation protocols are designed and supervised by mental health professionals.

Some of our key programmes include modules on Psychological Safety, Change Management, and Mental Health for Women Leaders, areas that directly influence how teams function and how leaders shape culture. We also design for segments often excluded from traditional well-being efforts. Feet on Street, our programme for grey-collared workers, equips supervisors with Mental Health First Aid skills and provides workers with simple, actionable tools for resilience in demanding field environments.

Our six-month Mental Health Ambassadors Program builds internal capacity by training managers to recognise distress early, respond effectively, and connect employees to the right level of care. This allows organisations to strengthen their mental health systems from within.

So, by combining clinical governance, targeted capability-building, and scalable digital tools, Amaha helps employers move beyond intent: creating workplace mental health programmes that improve utilisation, engagement, and overall employee outcomes in a sustained, measurable way.

5. Digital care has expanded access significantly, but inpatient and outpatient services require deeper personal engagement. How does Amaha’s hybrid model balance technology with human connection?

At Amaha, we see technology as serving two parallel purposes: it should make the clinician’s work smoother and more efficient, enabling them to focus on the client and the care, and it should make the client’s journey simpler and more coherent. That balance allows us to use tech without compromising the depth of the human connection at the centre of care.

For clinicians, the value lies in reducing friction. AI-assisted notes, structured assessments, and unified records aren’t add-ons; they’re core infrastructure. They ease administrative load, support clearer decision-making, and ensure that clinicians across digital, OPD, and IPD settings are working with the same data, tools and protocols. For clients, the same infrastructure removes the fragmentation that hybrid care can create. Because everything runs on a single backbone – a unified client profile and dashboard – so that their history, assessments, and progress outcomes move with them. They don’t need to repeat information or rebuild trust each time their care setting shifts.

This is the part of hybrid care that often gets overlooked. It’s not about offering online and offline services in parallel; it’s about ensuring the transitions between them are clinically coherent and operationally smooth. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to, and that’s where our model is fundamentally different.

6. As a mental health professional, how do you see the role of private organisations like Amaha complementing public health efforts such as Tele MANAS and the National Mental Health Programme?

Private organisations like Amaha play a complementary role to public health efforts such as Tele MANAS and the National Mental Health Programme. The public system is essential for scale and reach; private organisations can add depth, innovation, and the ability to move quickly. Together, they strengthen the ecosystem in ways neither can achieve alone.

Ultimately, the goal is alignment. When public, private, and community-led efforts work in tandem, we move closer to a system where every individual, regardless of where they first show up, can access timely, affordable, and high-quality mental health care

7. Many individuals still delay or avoid treatment due to stigma and cost perceptions. What steps is Amaha taking to normalise seeking structured care, including inpatient support, as part of mainstream healthcare?

Psychoeducation is central to solving for this. At Amaha, we break down diagnoses, treatment plans, medical prescriptions, and treatment outcomes in a way that is practical and easy to understand. Clinician-led videos, guides, and support kits help people understand what happens in outpatient care, when inpatient support is appropriate, and what outcomes to expect: demystifying the entire process. Coaches are also key here in helping people navigate their options when they aren’t sure where to begin.

Communities play an equally important role in recovery. Through the Amaha Hope Collective, we bring lived experiences of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, and recovery into public spaces, schools, workplaces, and online communities. When individuals hear stories from people who have benefited from structured or inpatient support, they begin to see these interventions as responsible, positive steps rather than the last resort.

We’re also working closely with 100+ employers across technology, manufacturing, BFSI, education, logistics, and healthcare, to embed different levels of mental healthcare into mainstream health benefits. When outpatient care, crisis stabilisation, and even short-term inpatient support show up alongside other health services people already use, they feel more legitimate, accessible, and normal.

We also have an extended network of 300+ psychiatrists that we collaborate with to strengthen early identification, and help professionals recognise when inpatient care is appropriate and communicate this to patients in a way that feels informed, transparent, and non-stigmatising.

8. Amaha’s approach spans prevention, therapy, psychiatry, and now inpatient care. From a systems perspective, how does this continuity improve patient outcomes and long-term recovery rates?

First, care becomes seamless. Because every service follows a unified clinical governance framework, clients move through assessments, treatment plans, and handovers without losing context. This reduces drop-offs, increases concordance to treatment, and ensures people feel held by the system rather than passed between disconnected services. It also makes it easier to step up or step-down care based on real-time needs, which improves both safety and recovery trajectories.

Second, shared information and standardised protocols make early intervention far more effective. Teams across settings work with the same understanding of symptoms, risks, and progress. This allows us to respond sooner, stabilise faster, and maintain a higher quality of care through consistent supervision and audit processes.

Third, long-term recovery is stronger when biological, psychological, and social needs are addressed together. In our model, psychiatry doesn’t sit apart from therapy, therapy doesn’t sit apart from family work, and none of these function independently of structured routines, digital tools, or environmental supports. For example, medication decisions are informed by therapeutic progress, and therapists are alerted to clinical changes observed in inpatient or outpatient reviews. This integrated approach is what makes long-term recovery more stable and relapse less likely.