Mental health problems are fast increasing
Caught between social taboos and scarce resources, mental health problems are fast becoming India's most lethal silent killers and there is still almost no acknowledgment of the size and scope of the crisis at hand. A recent study published by The lancet takes an in-depth look at this problem and throws up some worrisome figures. The study found that in 2013, as many as 31 million years of healthy life were lost to mental illness in India, and it expects this number to see a 23 per cent increase — to 38.1 million by 2025. The study also looks at China, which is facing a similar problem, and discovers that while the Asian giant lost 36 million years of healthy life in the same year, it will see a 10 per cent increase over the next decade. Though the approaches of India and China to mental health issues are quite different, both face similar challenges at the core: Only a tiny percentage of those who suffer from mental illnesses in these countries seek medical attention, and the ones that do, don’t always receive the best possible care due to institutional and infrastructural problems. India, for example, has only 0.3 psychiatrists per 1,00,000 people, while China does slightly better with 1.7 psychiatrists per 100,000 people. The situation is made worse by the fact that even the country's medical education is so structured that aspiring doctors only do a short training in this field and few are encouraged to specialise in the subject.
Also, in India, mental health facilities are not properly distributed across the country: There are 443 Government-run mental hospitals but almost all of these are located in the south and the west. This leaves a combined population of about 56 million people in the north and east without a single mental hospital. Finally, even though Government funding for mental health has consistently improved over the years, it still falls short of fulfilling the basic minimum requirements in fact, mental health accounts for less than one per cent of the country's total health budget, which in itself is less than two per cent of the country's Gross Domestic Product. The National Mental Health Policy that was unveiled in October 2014 by the Modi Government, promised the sort of large-scale institutional and systemic reform that is necessary to improve mental healthcare in India, but in the year-and-a-half since then, it seems to have made precious little progress.