Opinion: The Paradox of Focus on Mental Health During the Pandemic
This year’s theme for Mental Health Day is ‘living in an unequal world’, and the slogan by the World Health Organisation is ‘Mental health care for all: let’s make it a reality’. This article is in the spirit of this theme, analysing if mental health care for all is really possible in the current context of our country.
We are trying to fight a losing battle towards mental health. Besides the fact that therapies and treatments borrowed from Western research, and merely contextualized in our country, are highly individualised, it also exempts any authority from trying to bring systemic changes. When the pandemic hit us, and the world had gone into lockdown, the topic of mental health had become a fad amongst governments, organisations, and institutions.
There were many talks, debates and discussions surrounding its importance. But as an insider, I do not really see any change that would really matter. To put forth my views, I write this post to trace how the pandemic had made social and macro-level issues worse, impacting an already deteriorating collective mental health of the citizens in our country. It will cover three main topics of institutional insensitivity, employee and workers’ exploitation, and oppressive systems, ending with a not-so-happy conclusion.
Institutional insensitivity to mental health
Given the rise in discussion around mental health, one would expect the government to give the field more importance. However, apart from one or two additional contractual counsellors’ job posts, no long-term monetary investment or programme implementation has been made by those who have the authority.
Educational institutes have been more than insensitive to their own students. Students have been forced out of hostels amidst a lockdown, late submission of fees has been penalised severely, and schools and colleges have opened prematurely after the lockdown, leading to many students and their families being infected with Covid-19. There have hardly been any concessions about exams and assignment submissions, despite understanding the deteriorating mental health of students. Even if a teacher wants to give such concessions, they are bound by university rules, and the requirement to maintain ‘evidence’ for the marks given.
Beyond these, government institutions have resorted to punitive methods of implementing laws. Some people have justified the use of unnecessary force or monetary fines to implement the wearing of masks or following protocols. But it still does not answer why such machineries have also entered people’s private homes to check if ‘they are wearing masks inside their own houses or not’ (to be honest, houses of people with higher income never get invaded in such a manner. Specifically, it is always the people from the lower-income group who face the consequences of such policies and state actions). Imagine being made to feel that unsafe in your own homes and the impact it will have on your mental health (if your homes are not razed to the ground during the pandemic, that is)!
Such paradoxical actions towards mental health almost make you feel that only some people’s mental health matters.
Overburdened workers and mental health
Despite becoming a fashion, private organizations have done very little, at a policy level, to improve their people’s mental health. For example, the Indian corporate world must understand that introducing a “Yoga Day”, whilst continuing exploitation of their employees, would not really miraculously improve their mental issues. Work from home, having blurred the work life-private life distinction, made the ‘work’ never-ending. Women have faced the worst brunt of it, as they were expected to work all round the clock both professionally and privately.
But the mentality of the corporates really reflects our own. Many of us refused to pay wages to our house helps because they ‘didn’t work’ during the lockdown, even when our income was not significantly affected. The migrant crisis during the first lockdown only served as poverty porn for our frail narcissistic ego. It is almost as if mental health is a commodity of luxury and people who do not earn enough do not possess such exquisite product. One only needs to look at the discussion of mental health never really talking about people who live at the edges of this unequal world.
Oppressive cultural and social systems
If anything has benefited from the pandemic, it is the oppressive cultural and social systems and those who stand to gain from them. The rise in domestic abuse, whether towards women or the children of the household, is striking evidence of how deep-rooted such violence is within one’s own family. The few hours of respite that women would get when their husbands would be out working vanished during the lockdown. But it also shows how women have been living in such conditions for ages and nothing has been done to make life better for them. Economically employed women having to perform all housework with no help from their husbands or male family members brought forth the glaring inequalities of our society.
How does one aspire to ensure ‘mental health for all’, if a majority of our people are living with such everyday mental, emotional, and physical trauma?
There are so many such instances that have only accentuated the impact on mental health — increase in child marriages, closing of shelter homes for survivors, loss of medical access for persons with disabilities, people being pushed into deeper poverty, caste and religion-based violence where one is always under the threat because of their identity, and a never-ending list of harsh conditions propagating mental issues that ‘simple discussions and debates’ cannot really resolve. So, how are we really taking care of everyone’s mental health?
A grim conclusion
If you ask me to give you solutions, I must admit my own incompetence to do so. Unless there is some macro-level change, most people cannot really afford to have ‘adequate mental health’. This shows how social, legal, economic, and psychological are so interrelated.
For example, the lack of proper labour laws or their implementation has fuelled employee/worker’s exploitation. Or the lack of proper planning to aid survivors of domestic violence has led to many women and children staying behind in such households. How can anyone’s mental health thrive in such scenarios?
Individual therapy sessions and treatments will never be enough to tackle such cases, and I, as a psychologist, feel helpless at my own inability to really help people come out of it.
To help you see it better, I wish to conclude this post with one personal instance. Ever since the lockdown, I have been asked by many student groups to hold webinars. Despite a contradictory opinion, I do agree for it. In one of my webinars on stress management, I was asked about techniques to manage stress when the student’s family members keep fighting all throughout the day. Though not a permanent solution, I suggested distancing herself from the situation, if not mentally, then at least physically, by going out for a walk in the park for 20 minutes. To this, she replied, “but I am a girl. I am not allowed to go out alone; not even to the park”. And that was the dead-end to my seven-year-long training and experience in counselling.
Views are the writer’s own and do not necessarily represent the viewpoint of Volunteers Collective.
Written by Mitakshara Medi. Mitakshara is an Assistant Professor of psychology at Manav Rachna University. She is a mental health expert and advocate at Volunteers Collective.
