India is moving towards a serious mental health crises

India saw the biggest pandemic in history, when - on 25th March - its 1.3 billion citizens battened down in an attempt to flatten the COVID-19 curve. The unlock now may have started - a new epidemic is now emerging. According to a survey conducted by the Indian Psychiatry Society, within a week of the start of the lockdown, the number of reported cases of mental illness in India had risen by 20%. (As per records almost 7.5% of population is mentally affected as of 2019)

In coming months ahead, India will suffer from a massive mental health crisis due to unemployment, alcohol abuse, economic hardship, domestic violence and indebtedness. While this will affect most of the population it will harshly affect the poor, most vulnerable and marginalized groups.

India’s already overburdened mental health machinery will be unable to handle this forthcoming situation, and will need to leverage the power of communities with self devised solutions.

Here are three:

1. Awareness

The gamut of information pouring about COVID-19 in many forms like television news channels, social media, word of mouth, etc has created a havoc due to lack of awareness about how the disease spreads and how it attacks the human body. In many cities, healthcare workers, who are treating COVID-19 patients during the day, have been forcefully evicted from their homes out of fear that they may be bringing the virus back at night. People who tested positive are being locked in apartment schemes by their society members.

The entire social distancing narrative has to be rebuilt and redeveloped.

It's a great initiative by some COVID-19 survivors turning to social media to share their experiences in order to build confidence amongst others affected. There's a growing opportunity to train the mass, with more than 700,000 people now recovered, we can utilize them and turn them into COVID-19 Survivors- supporting them to educate others who are now feared to be positive or are under suspicion and kept in isolation. Survivors having recovered, are the right people to restructure the situation.

2. Building resilience amongst youngsters and teenagers

With schools closed for the past few months, 253 million adolescents in India are stuck with families unsure about their financial future, a lack of personal space, and most importantly separated from their friends. They are exposed to widespread fear geared by the massive spread of the virus, compounded by constant news chatter about death and disease which creates uncertainty and apprehension about their loved ones. Many of the community support systems outside of the families have become unavailable, particularly for young girls, and domestic violence is on the rise. For an entire generation to grow up in these conditions, with no clear answers for the foreseeable future, is unprecedented and will have a significant impact on their worldview.

3. Growing unemployment and social imbalance leading to deaths and suicides

With growing economic fissures exposed by the pandemic many companies forced to shut down due to lockdown and labours struggling to get back to their families, India is seeing the worst spurge in its unemployment rates as of May, 2020 India has a spike of 27.11% in its unemployment which was nearly 7% before the COVID-19 hit in March, 2020.

We are witnessing depleted social safety nets, starvation, increase in gender-based violence, homelessness, alcoholism, loan defaults and millions slipping into poverty. Our post-Covid scenario will be a booming ground for an increase in chronic stress, anxiety, depression, alcohol dependence, and self-harm leading to an overall rise in morbidity, suicides and the number of disability-adjusted life years linked to mental health.

For a country with the highest number of poor and malnourished, and individuals with depression and anxiety, this is the perfect storm. How many suicides can we expect? India reported 1,34,516 suicides in 2018. Most independent estimates are far more. The World Health Organization (WHO) pegged 2016 suicides at 215,872, with a suicide rate of 16.5 suicides, against the global suicide rate of 10.5. History tells us that India should prepare for a large number of suicides, even in the thousands. Other than human suffering, suicide has an economic dimension, each death costs Rs 265,000 in the first year alone, says a study by Gopala Sarma Poduri in the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine. Short-term costs include hospital expenses for the act leading to death, autopsy expenses, police investigations, funeral expenses, etc. Long-term costs include the lost income that could have been earned by the person till retirement, tax that the government lost from that income, among other things.