One out of five people in India suffers from depression. Every 40 seconds, one person dies of suicide and in total, 800000 people die every year. It’s devastating, isn’t it? Now what’s even scarier is that something this important is not being taken seriously. Mental illness in India, more than being an actual illness to be confronted with proper treatment, is just limited to and rather defined as “just a bad phase” or “it’s all because you’re on your phone” or ” stop overthinking and maybe get a life”. The only relevant sickness/illness in India is the one where you’re physically unwell. The state of mind is the last priority.
However, if a person does get diagnosed with a mental illness, society ostracizes them. Which in turn, makes things worse.
The rates of depression and suicides in the 21st century have gained a huge spike and especially because of youth coming out to the world about their sexuality, the LGBTQ+ community, and the world not accepting them for who they are, things are pretty much not good. In fact, they’ve been the worst.
Research has shown that women have a higher risk of suffering from mental illness than men. Reasons can be many, such as women facing everyday sexism, pre-menstrual problems, hormonal changes, pregnancy, postpartum depression, sexual abuse, and so on.
Now when we talk about teenage depression, the conversation quite often wraps up with one fact, “it’s all because you teens are always on your phone”. And that’s irrelevant. Most of the children in India have been exposed to some of the other forms of trauma in their childhood.
The most difficult part for teenagers of knowing that you need help is not being able to talk to your parents about it. The stigma that surrounds mental health has really gotten parents a dismissive attitude about mental illnesses. They define depression as mere sadness which according to them would go away if we stopped being on social media and start meditating. A lot of times parents just laugh about it and it’s extremely heartbreaking to see that. Parents do not have a soft and sensitive approach towards their teen child being sad and inactive. Instead, they scold them for being lazy and not scoring well in their exams.
And this pattern goes on till it’s extremely late. Parents do not want to acknowledge the fact that their child might need a therapist because “we give you everything, how can you be depressed”. Gaslighting should I call it.
However, it’s never too late to start learning about this. Mental health awareness and genuine talks on mental health can lead to fruitful results and might save many lives.