A thud!
Something fell from high above!
In no time, a bright young life of just a 32-year-old highly accomplished professional – a widely admired soul, vanished in the thin year, for good, mostly unnoticed in the quiet neighborhood, initially.
The news was more than a shock to my family. It engulfed me by the fire of impotent rage against this cruel play of destiny, where nothing can be undone, just nothing!
What prompted this so bright, successful, hugely promising and an ever-helpful-to-all guy doing what he did? No one could ferret out the answer, just yet, and possibly would never be.
Medical literatures have now established a close relationship between depression and its possible lethal outcome – suicide. Using literature data, one can estimate that 60 to 70 percent of the subjects attempting suicide were suffering from depression of various kinds. Was this young man too silently suffering from this undiagnosed and untreated mental illness?
In this article, I shall dwell on this important aspect of overall health care in India.
Depression ranks 4th in the 10 leading causes of the global burden of disease:
The World Health Organization (W.H.O) underlines: “Major depression is now the leading cause of disability globally and ranks fourth in the ten leading causes of the global burden of disease. If projections are correct, within the next 20 years, depression will have the dubious distinction of becoming the second cause of the global disease burden. Globally, 70 million people suffer from alcohol dependence. About 50 million have epilepsy; another 24 million have schizophrenia. A million people commit suicide every year. Between ten and 20 million people attempt it.”
A recent study:
Currently in India, millions of people with mental illnesses continue to remain untreated. This is vindicated by a chain of recent research studies titled, “China-India Mental Health Alliance Series”, published in ‘The Lancet’ on May 18, 2016.
The studies highlighted that: “China and India, which together contain 37 percent of the world’s population, are both undergoing rapid social changes. Because mental disorders account for a high proportion of morbidity, detailed knowledge of the mental health status of the populations in these two countries, and the evidence-base regarding the treatment of those disorders, are of paramount concern.”
“In China, mental, neurological and substance use disorders accounted for 7 percent of all (years of healthy life of the whole population) in 1990, rising to 11 percent by 2013. Similarly, in India, the proportion of all burden explained by mental, neurological, and substance use disorders rose from 3 percent in 1990 to 6 percent in 2013,” the researchers highlighted.
Greater concern in India:
In 2013, 36 million years of healthy life were lost to mental illness in China, and 31 million in India. The new research estimates that by 2025, though 36.9m years of healthy life will be lost to mental illness in China (10 percent increase), it will be 38.1m in India (23 percent increase). Anxiety and depression are the most common mental health problems among working age adults between 20 and 69 years.
Similarly, dementia is emerging as a growing mental health issue for both countries. However, from 2015 to 2025, it is estimated that the number of healthy years lost due to dementia will increase by 82 percent in India against 56 percent in China.
Interestingly, in August 2016, replying to a debate on the ‘Mental Health Care Bill’ in the Parliament, the Union Health Minister Mr. J. P. Nadda said, around 6-7 per cent of Indian population suffered from mental illnesses, while 1-2 per cent suffer from acute mental disease.
This means, over 70 million people are affected by mental illness in India, which has a close association with the rate of suicides, cardiovascular disorders, and loss of a significant number of productive days. It is estimated that around 50 percent of people with severe mental disease and around 90 percent of those with less severe symptoms, remain untreated in the country.
Depression, reportedly, the most prevalent form of mental illness that affects almost 3 to 5 percent of urban population living in cities, such as, Mumbai or Delhi. Around 30 percent of them are severely neurotic.
Alzheimer’s disease was reported to be the most common of severe disorders (54 percent) followed by vascular dementia (39 percent).
Another Government statistics indicate that 20 percent of Indians reportedly need counselling at some point of their lives. One per cent of the population suffers from serious mental health disorders, while 5-10 percent of Indians suffer from moderate disorders.
Another recent study:
Another recent report published in ‘The Lancet Psychiatry’ on 12 August 2016, captured the following details for India, in this area:
- Very few population-representative data were found for mental disorders, with an average coverage of just 1 percent of the country’s population.
- Major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, and alcohol dependence were the most common mental, neurological, and substance abuse disorders, for men.
- For women, anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and dysthymia were most common.
- Human and financial resources for mental health are grossly inadequate with less than 1 percent of the national health care budget allocated to mental health in India.
- Improvement of coverage will need to address both supply-side barriers and demand-side barriers related to stigma and varying explanatory models of mental disorders.
An associate professor of psychiatry at New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), reportedly said, there is just one psychiatrist for every 400,000 Indians. Apparently, he also said that there are only about 4,000 psychiatrists, 1,000 psychologists and 3,000 social workers in the entire country of over 1.2 billion people. Only 1,022 college seats for mental health professionals are set aside in India.
Or, in other words, a huge dearth of trained mental health professionals, coupled with low public investments, and fueled by high associated stigma, continue to compel many Indian populations lose many years of their lives to the illness.
Role of traditional medicines:
The study also suggests that traditional medicine practitioners, who are so common in..............
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