Editorial
Mental health concerns
Time to address these
It is disquieting news that no less than 16 percent of the country's adult population is suffering from some kind of mental disease or disorder. It is the finding of the latest survey conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health. The study has also found that women are more vulnerable to mental disease than men.
It is a sad truth that mental diseases never quite receive the kind of attention and treatment that physical disorders usually do in our society. A huge number of people are not even aware of the fact that most of the mental problems can be cured through timely diagnosis and good treatment. The mental patients are often viewed as a burden and are not given their due in society. This is an attitude, which has to be changed before everything else, if we want to create the social milieu for mental patients to come out of their extremely unfortunate situations. Then, there is the need for developing the treatment facilities for such patients which at the moment are anything but adequate. Whatever facilities we have are basically confined to the cities and patients living in rural areas have little access to them.
The problem is clearly getting more and more acute as complexities of urban life are something that certain individuals cannot always cope with psychologically. Moreover, the factors contributing to healthy mental growth of children are being ignored in all modern settings. There are no open spaces, playgrounds, affordable recreation centres for majority of the people. Educational institutions that once happened to be centres for constructive guidance and counselling are becoming business like entities. There are far fewer doctors for mental patients than for other diseases. The ratio between psychiatrist and mental patient will have to be increased as the infrastructure for mental treatment expanded.
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