Research Trends and Knowledge Mapping of India’s Mental Healthcare Act, 2017: A Bibliometric Analysis
Vishnu Mangalamchery, P. C. Anver, N. A. UvaisAbstract
Background:
The Indian Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 (MHCA, 2017) enshrines a rights-based framework for mental health care, but its translation into practice remains uneven. Understanding how scholarship has evolved around the Act can illuminate priorities, gaps, and implementation challenges.
Objective:
To map and evaluate the scholarly literature on the MHCA (2017–2025), describing publication trends, leading contributors and institutions, collaboration patterns, funding landscape, and dominant research themes.
Methods:
A bibliometric analysis was conducted using Scopus. The records were limited to English-language articles and reviews explicitly addressing the MHCA in titles, abstracts, or keywords. Data were exported in comma separated values format and cleaned to remove the duplicates and harmonize author, institution, and keyword variants. Descriptive analyses summarized annual output, document types, sources, authors, and citations. VOSviewer was used to construct co-authorship (authors and organizations) and keyword co-occurrence networks with minimum thresholds for inclusion.
Results:
The search identified 103 publications (2017–October 29, 2025). The output surged postlegislation, peaking in 2019, and stabilized thereafter. Authorship was concentrated among a small group of highly productive scholars, with National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences as the leading institutional hub; All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Bhopal, AIIMS New Delhi, and Mysore Medical College and Research Institute contributed substantively. The corpus was predominantly India-centric with modest international collaborations (notably with the UK, Ireland, Australia, and the USA). Reported funding was limited, with a handful of studies supported by the national and international agencies.
Conclusions:
Scholarship on the MHCA is active yet concentrated across a narrow set of authors and institutions, with limited collaboration density and sparse funding. To align research with the Act’s rights-based ambitions, future work should prioritize multi-center and international collaborations, expand domestic funding, and shift from descriptive mapping toward evaluative and outcomes-focused designs addressing access, quality, human rights safeguards, and legal redress.