MENTAL HEALTH OF YOUTH : Depression, Suicide and Crime

-Satyam, CNLU, 3rd year

-Anjali Kumai, ILS Pune, 3rd year

Mental health includes emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. [1] Mental Health is the most ignored and stigmatized as people abstain from talking about Mental Health and mental well being. One of the reasons behind people's abstinence from talking about mental health is that it is stigmatized as madness in most of the developing countries. A person can be physically fit and act and behave in a normal way but still can suffer from depression and can develop suicidal tendencies. This is the reason why we see in our society and in the entire world that suicide is growing each year.

W.H.O. data says that close to 800 000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds. There are indications that for each adult who died by suicide there may have been more than 20 others attempting suicide. Suicide occurs throughout the lifespan and is the second leading cause of death among 15-29-year-olds globally. Moreover, 79% of suicides occurred in low and middle-income countries in 2016[2]. India falls in the category of both low and middle-income countries and with the youth population, as researches show that India will be the world’s youngest country by 2020, with an average age of 29 years per person, the median age of India was 26.8 years.[3] So if we put reliance on the WHO data, then it can be inferred that Indians in general and more specifically the youths of India are suffering from a great problem of poor Mental Health.

Poor mental health causes many other problems to a society, as attempting suicide is the stage of depression, when the person is left with no hope and ending one’s self life is the ultimate solution which the person finds. Depression causes irritation and hatred towards their own self, society, and every other thing affecting human life. During this time people are prone to get involved in the addiction of drugs and other intoxicants, as those things provide the person with the temporary pleasure and for procuring such intoxicants, while in the influence of such intoxicant and for various other reasons like hatred towards some individual or an entire society, people get involved in crime. So it will not be wrong to say that poor mental health is one of the major reasons why an increasing trend of crime in society is seen. The need of the hour right now is to develop a certain mechanism by which mental health can be improved.

[1] What is Mental Health, available at: https://www.mentalhealth.gov/basics/what-is-mental-health (last visited on September 4, 2019). [2] Mental Health, available at: https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicideprevent/en/ (last visited on September 4, 2019). [3] Median age of the population in India 2015, available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/254469/median-age-of-the-population-in-india/ (last visited on September 4, 2019).