Once I was assigned to summarize, contextualize and present a research paper of my choice related to HR violations around the world as a requirement of my Human Rights & Citizenship course. And I chose one on Mental Health and how the taboos associated with it impacted the sufferers. In hindsight, it may not have been the most pragmatic decision on my part owing to what happened next. And to be fair, it was an emotional choice, as I could personally relate to it. Therefore, I had put my heart into forming my arguments and tried to present it to the best of my ability despite my anxiety. And yet it bombed.
I couldn’t garner any support from anyone other than those who already acknowledged the importance of it. My topic, in particular, was about how the prevalent prejudice and misinformation regarding mental illness was one of the greatest obstructions between the affectees getting the help they needed and added to their miseries. Yet, once I was done, the first question that was asked to me questioned the existence of depression in its entirety in our Motherland in general, (depression, because that’s, of course, the only mental illness) qouting the author of How to Win Friends And Influence People, the general guide to people-pleasing to form their argument.
The said questioner’s arguments depicted a typical Pakistani’s obsession with looking better than the West by turning a blind eye to one’s own dirty facade, with most of them favouring our tightly knit society as compared to the isolated ones in the West where things like depression could prosper, all the while being clearly oblivious to the complexity of mental illnesses beyond environmental factors.
Naturally, I was shocked to my core, because I hadn’t thought nor had the slightest clue that this was the level of our discourse around Mental Health in our public Universities, even those in the country’s capital, as it was in my case. After all, aren’t people in academia of all supposed to know better?
I remember standing taken aback, while the whole discussion whirled into the entire class dividing into groups to fight the existence of depression as a mental illness instead of brainstorming about what could be done to better the situation for those who suffer. The triviality of the discourse was disheartening, but what was more concerning for me was how even our instructor dismissed depression as lack of faith, a ‘phase’ at best, and pronounced crying to be the best remedy to ‘snap out’ of it.
Throughout the short time, I have spent so far in University, I have struggled with my mental health and struggled even more to see our teachers who think of themselves as mental giants denying the existence of it simultaneously. We as youth aren’t made aware of the free counseling options (if they exist), and the teachers aren’t trained to treat students like humans with dignity, self-respect, and personal struggles of their own. But if any young person can’t take it anymore, can’t deal with their obnoxious professors and parents, and the maddening academic pressure put on them and succumbs to their deteriorating mental health by taking any life-threatening decision; then they are bashed and pronounced to have lesser faith by some random person on the internet now and then, that makes a saddening number of people jump on the same bandwagon. While the miseries of those suffering remain unaddressed, making the vicious cycle of trauma continue until another life is lost!
What’s horrendous is even after having seen so many incidents of students attempting suicide, there still hasn’t been much proper legislation about it. But of course, suicide is a criminalized offense in the country, even though studies suggest that 90% of them happen due to mental disorders; for which the government isn’t helping the people about, but is adamant about punishing those who don’t die.
According to an estimate by WHO, thirteen thousand people lost their lives due to suicide in Pakistan in the year 2012. But clearly, that wasn’t enough cue for the government to think that they might be dealing with a mental health epidemic that needed proper concrete solutions, and not just bayans and fatwas. Or so the estimate for 2016 revealed, where over 5500 lives were lost due to suicide in the country. It’s pertinent to note that a lot of times suicides in the country are not even reported because of the humiliation and harassment of people by the police.
Reports suggest that 36% of people in Pakistan suffer from anxiety and depression. There are millions of people according to an estimate struggling with addiction, which too is a major taboo here despite it rendering the addict totally helpless beyond a certain point. How much up does that figure have to go for it to be recognized as a legitimate social emergency?
This negligence on the government’s part is purely criminal because it’s not just costing us precious lives now; but also those who have learned to live with it too fail to live up to their potential and lead unfulfilling lives because of their poor mental health.
I found help for my poor mental health condition quite late and after years of struggle, even though I knew I needed it from the beginning and wasn’t even prejudiced against the idea of having it, but there weren’t enough options for me to choose from. Moreover, the financial barrier of being a student who was fighting a social battle, and wanted or (rather was made to) to do it all alone, was also very real. It’s important to note here that I am a part of the privileged minority that can afford University, if not more in the Capital. It was then that I realized how smug and privileged it was of me when I was in a better mental state to simply tell people to seek help or go to therapy not knowing the ground realities of how difficult it was to afford a professional. Furthermore, there weren’t enough professionals that I felt I’d be comfortable with. I recently came across the figures and found out that this is what stops a third of people from seeking professional help and makes them tend to other pseudo-spiritual options in Pakistan.
We spend 1% (a little less than that even) of our development budget on Health. The poor can’t even afford to care about their physical health unless it goes really bad. In the case of mental health, the affectees suffer even more because there’s no budget allocated to it, and solely being a commodity of the private sector, therapy is really expensive for even any middle-income family/person to afford let alone someone from the working class. If that’s not enough to be frustrated about!
A lot of the stigma associated with mental health comes from the fact that the only rehab facilities provided to people are those psychiatric hospitals aka ‘mad houses’ with such a horrible living environment, that even a mentally healthy person’s health would be at risk there, let alone the healing of those mentally challenged.
Moreover, the misrepresentation of mental health in our media and our popular culture where the patients are either stereotyped to be aggressive or violent or so easy to deal with, (their suffering being trivialized all the while) that they can be healed with a single sermon of an imam, an ayah of the Quran, (again with the implication of them having a weaker faith) is a bigger failure on the government’s part for even if they couldn’t afford to provide free mental health care for all, they could at least help sensitize the general public about the issue by explaining the complexity of it.
Even though frightening, it’s no wonder that a platform is provided to self-proclaimed faith healers on national TV to help wear off a djinn’s influence but not to healthy legitimate debate on how to take care of one’s mental wellbeing. And then the general public is blamed for believing in what they are shown by the intellectual elite!
Having this discussion right now is extremely relevant, owing to the recent death of one of Bollywood’s rising stars due to suicide, which made the taboo ‘S’ word in our culture the centre of discussion once again. And the results, as one would expect, weren’t pretty.
Apart from the little constructive dis-course, the death of a talented human being for the most part was used by televangelists and pseudo motivational speakers to reiterate the importance of ‘being religious’ in combating mental illnesses all the while very conveniently denying all lives lost due to suicide in the religious world, whereas it was deemed by others as an opportunity rather an invitation to decide the fate of the deceased for the Almighty. However, in the worst cases of all, it was reduced to jokes and memes on social media platforms, depicting the undeniable failure of the state and education system in sensitizing people about an issue the studies suggest might become the most common cause of death in the world by 2030.
The constructive discourse and actions taken so far to deal with this problem aren’t up to the figures one reads. Yet there’s some light too in the form of organizations like Taskeen, and Umang among others which are working to provide assistance and awareness regarding Mental Health. But being not-for-profit organizations their scope is limited, and therefore cannot cover the massive amount of people suffering from mental illnesses in the country.
As COVID-19 is revealing how flawed our health system is now more than ever, leaving us desperately demanding health reforms, I hope we pledge to add Mental Health too as a priority in the demands that we put in front of our representatives this time, even if the boomers call us snowflakes for that.
P. S Later that day after my presentation, an intellectual classmate sent me a ten minutes long video on How to Heal Depression by the greatest Qasim Ali Shah. And boy was I healed!
Illustration by Mahenoor Raphick. Picture credit to Dawn.
