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Background: Resilience has proved to be a versatile notion to explain why people are not defeated by hardship and adversity, yet so far, we know little of how it might apply to communities and cultures in low to middle income countries. Aim: This paper aims to explore the notion of resilience in cross-cultural context through considering the lived experience of internal migration. Methods: A sample of 30 participants with experience of migration was recruited from a low-income slum dwelling neighbourhood in the city of Pune, India. These individuals participated in biographical narrative interviews in which they were encouraged to talk about their experience of migration, their adaptation to life in their new environment and making new lives for themselves. Results: Participants referred to a variety of intra-individual and external factors that sustained their resilience, including acceptance of their circumstances, the importance of memory, hope for their children's futures as well as kindness from family friends and community members and aspects of the physical environment which were conducive to an improvement in their lives. Conclusions: By analogy with the widely used term 'idioms of distress', we advocate attention to the locally nuanced and culturally inflected 'idioms of resilience' or 'eudaemonic idioms' which are of crucial importance as migration and movement become ever more prominent in discussions of human problems. The nature and extent of people's coping abilities, their aspirations and strategies for tackling adversity, their idioms of resilience and eudaemonic repertoires merit attention so that services can genuinely support their adjustment and progress in their new-found circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the concept of resilience increasingly deployed across a range of issues in development studies—from conflict resilience to climate resilience—this paper considers the relevance of resilience concepts to current issues and concerns in global mental health. Resilience discourses can be seen as one response to the need for more holistic accounts of mental health that focus, not only on stressors and risk factors for mental ill health, but also recognize the sometimes overlooked capacities of people and communities to manage and coproduce their own mental wellbeing. For example, migration forms the backdrop to global mental health for a significant proportion of the world's populace. And yet, thus far, most literature on migrant mental health has tended to focus on risk factors and stressors with comparatively little consideration given to potential sources or resources for positive mental health and coping with adversity. Nevertheless, while concepts of "resilience" are increasingly advocated in development studies and global mental health contexts, such concepts also have their critics. For example, resilience rhetorics can "depoliticize" by appearing to normalize otherwise unacceptable circumstances which might—from post-development and other alternative critical perspectives—be viewed as politically constituted through-and-through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]