India’s mental health crisis and its effect on students
Indian students discuss stigmas around mental health — and how one organisation is working to eliminate them.
“When I was battling from depression, honestly, I was scared to talk to someone, even my parents. I felt that they may take it as a joke,” shares 16-year-old Indian student Dekshina Nair. “I started to hate myself. I had believed that I was not meant to be in this. I thought that I was a curse to my parents.”
India is in the midst of a mental health crisis. Stigmas around mental illness prevent many people like Dekshina from seeking help. If they do open up, loved ones often dismiss their experiences due to lack of awareness or misinformation. “Whenever I told [my parents] how I was feeling, they would just say that I am just dreaming,” Dekshina recalls. “I think that this is the main problem that is preventing more mental health victims from coming out. Whenever we try to speak to someone and share our problem they do not listen, they ignore, which causes the victims to think more negatively.”
19-year-old Khwahish Khan believes that fear of judgment also prevents many people experiencing mental illness from getting treatment. “‘Log kya kahenge? (What will people say)?’ is a Hindi dialogue one hears very often if they choose to opt for therapy,” she explains. “Personally, I have seen a few of my friends suffer from panic attacks and intense anxiety but still refusing to opt for therapy.” A shortage of mental health professionals in India — fewer than two for every 100,000 people — makes getting help even harder.
Students face a unique set of challenges that affect their well-being. Dekshina and Khwahish have witnessed the devastating impact of academic pressures on students’ mental health. “I have seen a lot of cases in India where the students commit suicide because they didn't get good grades or were not able to enter a particular college due to bad grades,” shares Dekshina. “Student life in India is really hard.”
Khwahish agrees. “We become so deeply immersed in studying that we often forget to check in with ourselves and take a break,” she explains. “It’s a race to get to the top, a race that does not treat mental health well.”
Since COVID-19 hit, the mental health crisis in India has only gotten worse. According to a recent survey by the Indian Psychiatry Society, one in five Indians has a mental illness, a 20% increase in cases since the start of the pandemic. The lasting impacts of the COVID-19 crisis — including unemployment, alcohol abuse, economic hardship, domestic violence and child marriage and labour — threaten to exacerbate the emergency. “I have heard from my friends that during this time in their villages the families of girls are starting to do early marriages,” says Dekshina; child marriage and labour can have lifelong effects on girls’ psychological health.
For 17-year-old student Kaushar Barejiya, one positive outcome of the COVID-19 crisis is that it has helped instigate conversations around mental health in her community. “There has been a lot of stigmatisation towards people who undergo mental illness, but now since the pandemic struck everyone, things are changing for the better as more people are advocating and amplifying their voices on mental health and providing mental support to people,” she shares. “There have been a lot of nonprofits coming in to help students exclusively to deal with the academic stress, fear of failing and many other things.”
One of those nonprofits is The Live Love Laugh Foundation (TLLLF). Founded by actress Deepika Padukone after she was diagnosed with anxiety and depression, the organisation works to reduce the stigma and change the way society looks at mental health. Through awareness programmes and campaigns, it helps people in India experiencing stress, anxiety and depression.
One of the foundation’s key initiatives is the “You Are Not Alone” school programme, which increases students’ and teachers’ awareness about mental health and reduces stigma around the subject. According to the World Health Organization, half of all mental illnesses begin by the age of 14 and often go undetected and untreated. That’s why TLLLF delivers sessions in a variety of local languages free of cost to schools across the country. Since beginning the programme in 2016, TLLLF has reached almost 200,000 students and 20,000 teachers through this programme.
To address the impact of COVID-19 on students’ mental health, the foundation is working to update the “You Are Not Alone” programme. “With everything that children all over the world or adolescents all over the world have gone through in the last six or eight months, it was very obvious for us that we had to redo that content,” shares Anisha Padukone, CEO of TLLLF. She says that the transition to online learning, being isolated from peers and support networks at school and being confined to tight living conditions with family members could all impact students’ mental health.
Through digital campaigns, Anisha and her team work to educate students on what they could be feeling. “A lot of times, at least in India, the way mental health has been structured so far, a lot of children don't even know what they're going through,” Anisha explains. “It's important to highlight to them that these are possibly the feelings that you're experiencing and if you are, then you could be, you know, in distress.”
During lockdown, the organisation partnered with Instagram to create the guide, “Mental Health in the time of COVID-19.” “From what issues they're facing to what that would mean for them and therefore, how can you seek help? We had some self-help tips. We've had helpline numbers as a call to action on every single post that went out,” Anisha says of the organisation’s digital awareness campaigns.
In addition to providing students with resources, The Live Love Laugh Foundation also targets parents and teachers so they can better support the young people in their lives. “We didn't want to just stop at our information for students because we feel that within the whole ecosystem of a student or an adolescent also lies the parent, also lies the teacher,” Anisha explains. She shares that the organisation teaches educators to “identify signs and symptoms in the students that are in their classroom.”
These initiatives are welcome to young people like Dekshina, who hopes to see teachers be more supportive of students’ mental health in the future. “Teachers should try to listen to students if they are coming and talking to them,” she says. “Teachers should try to comfort the students. Try to make them feel that they are safe.” She also hopes there is a shift in families’ priorities around education. “They should see that getting very good grades won't make a career. How much knowledge that person has that makes a career,” Dekshina says.
Kaushar seconds the need to focus on the importance of education outside of test scores. “There should be a positive approach towards a student life wherein they are just not made to learn and pressured for grades, but they are motivated and encouraged to look out for things which keeps them sane and in a positive state of mind,” she says.
In the future, Khwahish hopes to see more government support for mental illness. “The Mental Healthcare Act proposed in 2017 promised a monetary spending on mental health, however, the promise has not been lived up to,” she explains. “Sources claim that less than a fraction of the proposed amount has actually been spent on the cause. I hope to see the government take responsibility and act upon implementing the Act with utmost sincerity. We need to destigmatize mental illnesses and treat the people suffering from it with warmth and understanding.”
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