Program Overview

This summer, the 2026 Duke SRT team collaborated with our community partner, Udayan Care. Our work this summer primarily consisted of three streams: mental health screenings, workshop programming, and ensuring program sustainability.

Program Goals

The goal of our collaboration is to combine the insights from mental health screenings with targeted workshop material to create mental health initiatives that address Udayan Care's needs, expand upon the work of previous SRT teams, and establish a clear path towards sustainable implementation beyond the summer.

Through mental health screenings, we hoped to understand the current mental health status of the Ghar children and Aftercare program members. By comparing this with changes from previous years in high-risk populations, we can provide Udayan Care with a better sense of how mental health needs change over time.

Workshop programming was curated to address the personal, professional, and emotional needs of the Ghar and Aftercare residents, while also building upon the work of previous teams.

We sought to establish sustainability by creating effective mental health and operational manuals that outline standard mental health protocols at Udayan Care, summarize the work of all previous Duke teams, and provide a standardized set of mental health resources for Udayan Care staff members to use.

Mental Health Screenings

Mental health screenings involve individual interviews with Ghar, Aftercare, and Udayan Shalini Fellows. We utilized validated tools (DASS-21, PHQ-9, GAD-7), a new resilience measure, and a qualitative questionnaire to assess cross-sectional mental health data. As a team, we completed 95 mental health screenings.

The image to the left depicts the stratification of "high-risk" scores for based on participant responses. Other high risk indicators include self-harm ideation, suicidal ideation, and qualitative responses that we find notable. Following the mental health screenings, the mental health coordinator at Udayan Care is informed of participants with scores that fall into the pre-determined high risk criteria. This allows Udayan Care to understand the how the mental health of residents has changed at a high level over time.

Our work for the upcoming semester includes piloting a system of individualized case profiles for a subset of the participants. We want to use our findings from screenings to provide targeted information rather than a generalized overview of mental health data so that Udayan Care knows how to best support the mental health needs of the residents.

Workshop Programming

The workshops that we developed were targeted towards four primary populations at Udayan Care: Ghar, Aftercare, Udayan Shalini Fellows, and Caregivers.

Ghar Workshops:

Emotional Coping Strategies (11-14 years old):
- Goal: The goal of this workshop was to assess the continued use of coping strategies introduced in previous workshops and strengthen emotional regulation, resilience, and positive coping skills among children aged 11-14 in the Ghar program.
- Key Topics: Emotion Identification, Breathing Techniques (Chicken Breathing and Box Breathing), Grounding Techniques, Impulse Control, Emotion Misconceptions, and Positive Affirmations

Aftercare Workshops:

Career Readiness
- Goals: The goal of this workshop series was to empower Aftercare members with practical strategies to address academic & vocational stressors while strengthening confidence in professional skills needed to pursue educational and employment opportunities.
- Key Topics: Emotional Awareness, Coping Strategies (Breathing Techniques, Grounding & Mindfulness Strategies), Cognitive Reframing, Career Exploration, Resume Building, Communication Skills, Interview Preparation & Practice
- *Note: Career Readiness Workshops included Ghar residents aged 15-18 and Aftercare residents

Udayan Shalini Fellowship Workshops

Emotional Coping Strategies: Based on the recommendations from previous SRT teams, the emotional coping strategies workshop was piloted with the Shalini Fellows. This is because they do not receive regular programming on understanding and handling emotions, and the Noida chapter that we work with does not have a counselor to support emotional needs.
- Key Topics: Emotion Identification, Breathing Techniques (Chicken Breathing and Box Breathing), Grounding Techniques, Impulse Control, Emotion Misconceptions, and Positive Affirmations

Caregiver Workshops

Emotional Coping Strategies:
- Goal: The goal of this workshop was to promote the importance of self-care and foster a stronger sense of self appreciation among the caregivers. Through the activities, caregivers would be able to reflect on themselves and their life experiences in a supportive environment.
- Key Topics: Stress & Burnout Awareness (Recharging Your Batteries), Recognizing Signs of Burnout, Wellness & Self-Care, Understanding Personal Trauma & Building Identity (Rose, Bud, Thorn Activity), Foster appreciation and social support (Compliment Garland Activity)
Epilepsy and Seizure Management:
- Goal: There are two primary goals of this workshop:
  - Assess and augment caregiver knowledge, comfort, and confidence in performing epilepsy & seizure care skills.
  - Identify and address existing caregiver perspectives on biases and misconceptions surrounding epilepsy and seizures.
- Key Topics: What are Seizures, What is Epilepsy, Seizures vs Epilepsy vs Panic Attacks, Treatment Steps, Stigma & Misconceptions
Trauma-Informed Care:
- Goal: There are two primary goals of this workshop:
  - Assess and augment caregiver knowledge, comfort, and confidence in performing epilepsy & seizure care skills.
  - Identify and address existing caregiver perspectives on biases and misconceptions surrounding epilepsy and seizures.
- Key Topics: What are Seizures, What is Epilepsy, Seizures vs Epilepsy vs Panic Attacks, Treatment Steps, Stigma & Misconceptions

Workshop Material Samples

This image shows the worksheet that we distributed during the second session of the Career Readiness Workshop. We taught the participants about the different parts of the resume and how to craft strong experience section entries. The worksheet was part of an activity that allowed students to practice writing about their own experiences in a resume format.

This document depicts the cognitive distortions worksheet that was given to the Udayan Shalini Fellows to complete during the workshop. The participants were guided through an exercise with examples to understand how to recognize and address different thought processes that may be harmful, including overgeneralization and all-or-nothing thinking.

This document shows the pre-survey for the career readiness workshop with the Aftercare residents. With each survey that we developed, we thought about what responses we might expect and what information that would provide in order for us to report actionable findings back to Udayan Care. This helped us understand what types of questions would be most meaningful for us to ask.

This image depicts one of the pages from our "Intern Training Packet". This document was developed to guide our interns through the onboaridng process and provide a comprehensive set of information about each of the screening tools that would be included in each interview. Each screening measure underwent forward-and-back translation into Hindi to ensure that residents would be able to understand and respond to questions in a conversational format.

Sustainability

The primary objective of this stream was to establish a foundation for the Duke SRT teams' work to be continued when we are not present on the ground. Specifically, we aimed to expand on the work of previous SRT teams that created the Udayan Care Mental Health Technical Manual by documenting impact of the Duke SRT program on Udayan Care programming and resident mental health outcomes over time.

First, we developed a longitudinal outline of all work that has been completed by the Duke SRT team since 2014. This includes mental health screening measures, key findings, workshop content & material, and recommendations for future teams. This allows future Duke SRT teams and Udayan Care staff members to have a standardized document that delineates the accomplishments and growth of the Duke-Udayan partnership over time.

Next, we updated the operational guidelines for Udayan Care in the manual by incorporating all of the services that Udayan Care provides for their residents, including workshop programming, meeting with counselors or the psychiatrist, and updated follow-up procedures from the mental health screenings for counselors to reference. We intend to expand the manual further during the fall semester to include a "Caregiver Manual", which includes all of the workshop resources for caregivers and includes caregiver protocols for mental or physical health emergencies in the home.

In addition to the mental health and operational manuals, we also utilized lesson plans to document the planning process for each workshop that we hosted. The use of lesson plans was piloted by 2025 SRT member Ashley Talwar, who recommended that we continue the use of lesson plans so that future Duke SRT teams or Udayan Care staff members can replicate and update the workshops as necessary. Our hope is that these workshops may be incorporated into the existing collection of workshops that are delivered to residents, and that future SRT teams can build upon the work that previous SRT teams completed to address the needs of the residents most effectively.

Lesson Plan Template

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