IIT Mandi integrates Ayurveda and Yoga into systemic mental health frameworks to address student distress amid academic pressures
Original framing: “This IIT is solving the mental health crisis in students with ancient Indian knowledge” — bing news
The original framing omits the historical erasure of indigenous healing systems under colonial rule and postcolonial medical hierarchies, the role of neoliberal education policies in exacerbating student distress, and the commercialization of yoga/Ayurveda by global wellness industries. It also ignores the perspectives of Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim students who face additional systemic barriers to mental health support. Indigenous knowledge systems beyond Ayurveda and Yoga—such as community-based healing in tribal societies—are entirely absent.
High structural omission detected in mainstream coverage.
The narrative is produced by state-aligned Indian media outlets and IIT institutions, serving a nationalist agenda that legitimizes traditional knowledge systems while deflecting criticism of India’s competitive education model. The framing obscures the role of Western psychiatric paradigms in marginalizing indigenous healing practices and ignores how corporate interests in wellness industries co-opt such integrations. Power structures here include the IIT brand’s global prestige, the Indian state’s promotion of 'ancient wisdom' as soft power, and the erasure of critiques of academic capitalism.
Colonial rule systematically dismantled indigenous healing systems in India, replacing them with Western psychiatric models that pathologized non-Western practices as 'superstitious.' Post-independence, the Indian state prioritized biomedical frameworks, marginalizing Ayurveda to a secondary role until neoliberal reforms in the 1990s revived it as a 'soft power' export. The IIT’s initiative echoes 19th-century colonial-era 'civilizing missions,' where traditional knowledge was selectively appropriated to address modern crises while ignoring the structural violence that created those crises.
The IIT Mandi narrative exemplifies how nationalist framings of indigenous knowledge obscure deeper systemic failures, reducing mental health crises to a problem of cultural deficit rather than structural oppression.