Beyond survival: examining mental health outcomes and structural determinants among women domestic workers in jaipur's urban slums

सार

Urbanization is associated with the development of a better healthcare infrastructure, yet the number of vulnerable urban slums is also growing, which leads to a high rate of mental health disorders, especially in low-income environments and among marginalized women. The crux of the matter is that the mental health needs of women domestic workers who are multiply vulnerable by means of converging networks of economic exploitation, gender-based discrimination, and social exclusion in urban informal labor markets are systematically ignored.

This research paper looks at the psychological well-being of women domestic workers in the urban slum of Jawahar Nagar Kacchi Basti, Jaipur in India where there is a convergence of vulnerabilities along gender, class, and occupational lines. This study relied on mixed-methods convergent design where 250 women domestic workers were surveyed using psychometric tools that are validated, such as Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II), Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment (GAD-7) along with an extensive thematic analysis of deeper narratives through narrative interviews with 20 women.

The study indicates a worrying high rate of psychological distress, with 72 percent of the participants having clinically significant depression and 68 percent exhibiting moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety, which is much higher than the rates estimated in general population. In terms of qualitative analysis, four main spheres of psychological distress are found: the economic precarity due to low wages (mean monthly earnings amounted to 3,200 rupees) and constant job insecurity, physical fatigue caused by longer working hours, social isolation because of internal migration and a lack of connectivity with the community, and inaccessibility of healthcare services due to the financial situation.

The study uses the intersectional analytical framework that combines Intersectionality Theory, Social Determinants of Health Theory, and Structural Violence Theory to demonstrate the interaction of systems of oppression to form distinctive patterns of mental health vulnerability. The results show that the mental health issues that participants are facing are not personal pathologies but expected consequences of interacting systems of oppression that work simultaneously both on economic, social, and institutional levels. In the research, the authors reiterate that the best interventions have to be both structural and intersectional, where the interventive intervention has to be multi-systems of oppression, and not at the individual level.