Why Are Indians So Depressed?

What Causes Depression Among People in India?

Depression and anxiety has now become modern-day cancer. Finding a cure for depression is easy yet hard, given that it is something which lives inside your brain.

Depression is basically an enemy that we create. This enemy lives inside your head. And you know it's hard to defeat a foe that lives in your brain. Indians tend to be more depressed than the citizens of any other country in the world, says WHO study.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has ranked depression as the single most powerful contributor to global disability. Apart from that, depression and anxiety is also a major contributor to suicide deaths. Depression has increased by 18% from 2005 to 2015, worldwide.

India takes the first place among countries that are worst hit by depression. Source: The Times of India

The subject is not merely India, depression and anxiety is taking over the entire world with a strong surge. However, India is the most depressed country in the world, leaving the United States of America and China behind. 

It is to be noted that the utmost cases of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders were found mostly in India, with most of the cases going unreported.

So What Is Depression?

Depression is a mental disorder or a sort of mental illness. Today, the power of depression is such that more than 300 million people of all ages suffer from it, worldwide. These staggering numbers are enough to drag your attention to this global suffering.

What’s more astonishing is that the numbers of depressed people are increasing more rapidly than you can possibly imagine.

Technically, women are more affected by depression than men.

A study by the World Health Organization (WHO) states that at least 6.5% of the Indian population suffers from some form of serious mental disorder.

Although there are several useful treatments and measures to fight depression, there is an acute scarcity of mental health workers such as psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors. As per the latest report in 2014, the ratio of psychologists and depressed people in India was 1 : 100,000.

There is only 1 psychologist for 100,000 people in India

Also, in India, the average suicide rate is 10.9 for every 1 lakh people and the majority of people who commit suicide are below the age of 44 years.

There are innumerable reasons to why it is Indians that suffer the most from depression and anxiety worldwide. And some of the top reasons I’m going to put forward before the people of India and the entire world to let them know right now. So, here I go.

Ignorance

It’s a pretty hard job to live with depression in a country like India since most of our society is ignorant about mental illness. Mental disorders are perceived here as a matter of joke or ridicule. This is the reason most of the people prefer to suffer in silence than stating their mental condition in a straightforward way.

They fear that if they open up about their depression, anxiety or sufferings, people might make fun of then, and needless to say, they actually do. Because of this naïve personae of our society toward depression, it’s the common people with mental illness that suffer.

They lack their courage to open up to someone. They feel strangled by the society. And if, someone gathers some courage to express their problems with depression, the other person basically doesn’t want to let go of any golden opportunity to mock or ridicule them.

Lack of Awareness about Depression among People

This will be no surprise since I’m patching it with the very first point – ignorance. In our Indian society, there’s a serious lack of awareness about Mental Health and Well-Being. Here people tend to see mental illness as something terrible or taboo.

But, what most of us fail to perceive here is that mental illness is just like any other sort of illnesses. We do not laugh at someone suffering from Fever, Diabetes or Cancer, do we? Then why do we get so enthusiastic to make fun of someone suffering from depression?

Image Courtesy: Anti Stigma Week, International Bipolar Foundation

People’s failure and inability to feel the other person’s emotion and feelings are also one of the reasons why depression among Indians is such a big deal nowadays. We have built an “I don’t care” attitude to appear cool. And this is affecting the people around us intensely, with or without our knowledge.

Otherwise, think to yourself, how can we find it sensible to make fun of someone who’s suffering from an illness?

Shortage of Psychologists and Psychiatrists

The ratio of psychologist and depressed person in India is going to shock you. An illness like depression or anxiety is totally curable. But, if there are not enough psychiatrists or psychologists to provide the right treatment, how can one fighting depression come out of it?

In India, the scarcity of psychologists and psychiatrists is is a serious matter of concern. For 100,000 people in India, there is only 1 psychologist. Since there’s a serious shortage of psychologists and psychiatrists, the number of people with anxiety and depression is multiplying at a staggering rate.

One thing is clear from the above numbers - we need more psychologists and counselors. And if this huge gap between psychologist and people with depression is not bridged, it will certainly lead to grave consequences in future!

Social Media

New research shows how social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram etc can greatly have an effect on your mental health. The name may have ‘social’ in it but its poisonous consequences do not have even any distant connection with anything social.

An estimation of Social Media penetration in India by 2023

The recent studies conducted on the effect social media have linked the use of social media platforms to anxiety, depression, inattention, lower self-esteem, poorer sleep quality, and hyperactivity — often in teens as well as adolescents.

The list goes on.

Another new study has concluded that there is, in fact, an underlying connection between the use of social media and negative effects on primary depression, well-being and loneliness. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology published the study.

So how does social media trigger depression and affect your well-being?

I’ll give you a viewpoint here.

Let’s consider an individual struggling to get a job passes a considerable amount of time on facebook scrolling through the feeds that shows up in his timeline. Keep in mind that he is friends with a bunch of guys, certainly.

After a few minutes of scrolling here and there, he finds out that one of his close friends got a job in a reputed company.

Although he doesn’t hold any personal feelings of jealously or envy toward his friend’s getting the job, he somehow finds himself caught up in the middle of comparing his life with that of his friend’s. Now he starts to feel like a loser, maybe a good-for-nothing guy.

It doesn’t end here.

Now let’s consider any random man or woman passing time on facebook and instagram distributing Likes, Comments and Share throughout the day.

'Addiction' Sculpture in Amsterdam

When they come across such posts shared by their fiends like having a good time, bragging about how good their life is (which actually in not), or celebrities flaunting their nice body or beautiful skin or amazing clothes they are wearing etc – people using social media are, consciously or unconsciously, tend to compare their lifestyle to the grand lifestyle of those that flaunt theirs on facebook or instagram.

As a consequence, they end up feeling bad about their own self.

One thing is important to note here that the majority of these people appearing happy, joyful and satisfied with life on the social media are basically the ones who are either not happy with the way their life is actually going or simply looking for attention and sympathy from the people around them.

How beautiful or attractive a person is generally perceived on the basis of the number of likes and reactions they get on social media. Believe it or not, a cold battle always goes on, (especially among girls and women) to appear more important in this fake world and to gain more popularity.

There’s so much more to the negative effects of social media when you relate and contemplate. It’s actually consuming your confidence, self-esteem, productivity, compassion and not to mention, your time, gradually without even your knowledge.

And as overall comprehensive aftermath of all these, they fall prey to depression and anxiety. 

Stigma

To add more fuel to the sufferings of depressed people in India, stigma plays the ultimate role. The social stigma across India surrounding depression, anxiety and mental illness coupled with ignorance of the society majorly contribute in making the condition of the people even worse.

The way our society treats the people suffering with mental illness is surprising. They show their solidarity toward individuals suffering from depression with beautiful words and phrases like “retarded”, “pagal”, “mental”, “brainless”, “dumb”, “khiska hua” etc and so on. 

Takeaway

As depression and anxiety come as a giant beast to swallow the entire world, what we really need to do is accept mental illnesses just like any other illnesses. It is totally normal.

This is the only way we can contribute a little to the suffering person so that they might gather some strength to acknowledge their problem without having to care what the other person would think about them.

Finally, keep in mind that it’s only our ignorance that is killing their strength to give voice to their inner concerns.