By:Ahmad Wani
What exactly strikes one’s mind upon encountering the word ‘mental health’? However clichéd it may sound, it needs to be brought into the public domain, not in the form of something disabling but as something ubiquitous which has a profound impact on our day-to-day lives. With the dawn of civilizations, our social, cultural, technological, and behavioral patterns of living have been evolving at an abnormally rapid rate, a rate which probably would take millions of years of evolution to neutralize. This has left us face to face with a huge monstrous problem-the problem of mental health.
To add to it, calamities both natural and manmade including pandemics, famines, wars and draughts etc compound the issue further and push the human race to a volley of challenging scenarios and circumstances that further aggravate the mental health scenario.
It is now well established that the recent catastrophe which is far from over- the Covid-19 pandemic- has alarming implications for individual and collective health and emotional and social functioning. The pandemic has exposed people to a large set of mental health challenges, some of which are evident and some might surge in times to come. The pandemic caught the human race unawares and pricked the safety confines and health infrastructures across the globe exposing the fragility of the entire notion of advancement in healthcare sector.
In addition to providing medical care, already stretched health care providers have an important role in monitoring psychosocial needs and delivering psychosocial support to their patients, health care providers, and the public activities that should be integrated into general pandemic health care.
You’re more likely to experience mental illness in your life than you are to develop diabetes, heart disease or any kind of cancer – combined. Put another way, almost everyone develops a diagnosable mental illness at some stage in their life. More than 94 million are affected by Mental ill health. people of any age and in a variety of forms – such as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia – and comes with costs and consequences that impact individuals, families and carers, health and social systems, society and the economy. Social and economic inequality and exclusion are both a cause and a consequence of mental ill health: poor
Mental health is consistently associated with unemployment, less education, low income or standard of living, poor physical health, adverse life events, poor quality of life and stigma besides other reasons. These numbers seem huge, but keep in mind that almost only a tiny fraction of people actually have the courage to talk about their problems, while the majority just let the ailments hollow them from the inside without ever uttering a word about it. This leads to abnormally high numbers. But there is a choice to be made- either we suppress the issue for the fear of stigma or rejection and continue to suffer silently or we speak up, share and seek help for better and appropriate treatment of it.
