My ridiculously long mental health wish list for 2026

1. Therapists will embrace the 'solopreneur' identity unapologetically.
2. Psychology academia will include AI and business modules in their curricula to prepare students better for the AI age.
3. Peer support platforms will increasingly fill in the gaps left behind by therapy and psychiatry. This won't be just around mental health but around different difficult life experiences – a divorce, getting laid off, or a stigmatised physical health condition. These peer networks will transcend urban centres and scale virtually and even physically to tier II and III towns. A vital leverage: They will operate in local languages and will be a lot more affordable and less intimidating than signing up for therapy or pills.
4. Psychology interns will finally break free from the absurd and blood-sucking practice of having to pay for their internships. Internships will offer actual, useful learning instead of producing SEO-optimised blog posts and Instagram reels.
5. The therapist's and psychiatrist's clinic will turn more diverse.
6. We will talk more about non-AI technology that holds great promise, eg, the AVATAR Therapy for people who experience distressing voices.
7. The mental health sector will move away from vanilla solutions for mental health as a monolith and embrace a verticalised approach to home in on niches (such as PTSD or OCD).
8. We will enter the era of neighbourhood community centres that will combine clinical help with community events and activities. See for instance Agatsu. (Full disclosure: Founder Ira Khan is a Sanity community member.)
9. Investors will stop funding apps and bots that promise megablockbuster scale before proving clinical efficacy, safety, and the highest standards of data privacy. (The end of Woebot will hang over the sector like a cloud.)
10. Therapists on social media will increasingly ask themselves why they are on these platforms to begin with – to participate in shrill, polarising arguments for quick popularity or to quietly spread knowledge and awareness. The celebrity/influencer therapist will confront questions about the blurring of personal and professional boundaries and the murky question of social media fans and followers becoming patients. Some of these handles will end – badly.
11. Psychiatrists will become more visible on social media, which is currently dominated by therapists. They will help lay folks understand the history and philosophy of psychiatry in an attempt to build good-faith relationships with the public.
12. Regulators will finally offer a sane way to define and regulate the professions of clinical and counselling psychology.
13. The DSM's upcoming new edition will ... well, I don't really know what to expect from it, but I will be here for the entertainment.
14. More courses and PhD positions will open up at the intersection of mental health law, technology, and user rights.
15. Lived experience experts will be meaningful contributors to scientific research and not used to tick boxes. They will be particularly active in shaping funding decisions – one area where their contribution is negligible right now.
16. The media will discover stories like Brazil's Bolsa Familia cash transfer programme that led to a 61% reduction in the likelihood of suicide among the country's most economically vulnerable communities, instead of one more story on ChatGPT.
17. Community mental health projects will progress from a warm fuzzy idea with small islands of success to gaining at least 20% of the total investments in the global mental health sector. (That's an arbitrary number. Should it be higher? Lower?)
18. Workplace mental health programmes will stop addressing employees – who already know that taking a walk and petting a dog is good for their mental health but have no time to even take a quiet peaceful shit amid all their deadlines – and start addressing employers, the ones responsible for the distress among employees in the first place.
19. More books, articles, videos, and podcasts in local languages.
20. Media will stop giving away personal details of people who die by suicide, stop disclosing methods, stop saying "successful attempt", and stop using triggering images of nooses or pools of blood to accompany their reports.
21. More psychiatrists will adopt a sliding scale. (One of my former doctors, brilliant as he was, used to charge Rs 4,000. It was my single biggest monthly expense beyond rent.)
22. People with lived experience will no longer be asked to share their expertise for free by corporations, NGOs, and your neighbourhood whizz kid with a world-changing mental health startup idea.
23. There will be a new award for the finest portrayal of mental health in movies and web series. Go Netflix.
24. There will be more mainstream media coverage of the state of implementation of India's pathbreaking 2017 mental health legislation. Editors and reporters: why aren't more of you poring over this exceptional resource from the Keshav Desiraju Indian Mental Health Observatory?
25. Life coaches, wellness consultants, and 'healers' will reclaim their legitimate professional labels with pride and in good conscience instead of appropriating or appearing to appropriate clinical or counselling mental health expertise.
26. Children's and adolescent mental health – the orphan of development assistance for mental health – will finally get a bigger share of funding.
27. Sanity will survive year 6.
28. We will retire the word 'biopsychosocial' because there'll be no other model to understand mental health, so using it will be redundant.
29. Billionaires will stay away from meddling with the mental health sector.
30. The rocket to Mars will carry the complete works of Freud because what else can give our alien buddies a better window into humans?
31. Happiness and wellness programmes in schools and colleges will include tailored care for the unique vulnerabilities of students from different social groups, especially marginalised communities, with vastly different lived realities, instead of band-aid solutions like deep breathing and meditation classes, and removing ceiling fans from hostel rooms.
32. More people will find the courage to break up with their therapists because it ain't workin' no more.
33. Inpatient psychiatric care will stop being carceral. Humane examples will be celebrated in the mainstream.
34. The abysmal lack of reliable data on the mental health sector will show signs of improvement. More countries will report more data more punctually.
35. Alongside improved access to care, we will talk more about interventions designed to reduce iatrogenic harm.
36. Am I allowed to hope that we are able to find at least one causal biomarker for a mental illness, so that people like me can stop griping that psychiatry isn't an exact medical science?
37. More books on everyday mental health struggles alongside intense literature on loss and survival. Publishers will stop signalling that only stories of extreme pain and suffering deserve space. I'll have some more tteokbokki please.
38. Name yours. Let's see if we can get to 50. I will publish the best ones in a future edition.
    
    See you next year.
    
    Health and peace,
    Tanmoy

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