We strive harder to learn the dynamics of augmented reality and we take pride in building our e-learning experiences and increase our relationships with our smart gadgets. But what about the real relationships that’s breathing around us?
ROSELINE FLORENCE GOMES
Mental Health to the Fore
Indian Mental Health at the moment is crippling with varied unheard thoughts, actions and emotions. As a psychologist and an educator when I started intervening as a counsellor and facilitator from March 2020 to now, I was amazed as to how we have changed our outlook towards ourselves, our peers, our family members and the community at large. Instead of becoming more compassionate towards the situation we have absorbed the paranoia and started seeing humans as a threat and increased our judgemental skills. It’s heart-breaking to see how we as authority figures fail to recognise the needs and concerns of our children, the plight of our partners or spouses, the cries of our older citizens, …. During the lockdown, my encounter has been more with the youth as I volunteered to guide them through counselling sessions in initiating skill enhancement and personal development. Our Indian Youth are like changemakers and this lockdown has created an insecure space for them with the addition of ever-demanding family members, educational institutions and occupational forums. The youth of India covers one fourth of the global population in the world. Nine out of ten live in less developed geographical spaces and covers around 356 million of this age group from India - highest in the world! Youth mindsets and actions are the fastest growing personas in the global pandemic situation both pre and post. It governs their formative years and moulds their cognition, affect and behaviours.
Mental Health
This transformation in the Indian societal arena has brought in a change in the mental health capacities of youth groups and has been taking a toll on their psychological health. So, what is mental health? It’s basically our emotional state that guides our self-expressions and social interactions, and epitomises our approaches towards personal and social judgement. It’s the interplay of our emotions, thoughts and actions in our day to day world. Whenever there is a conflict in any one of these mechanisms, it leads to a breakdown in mental health. The task is to understand the personal ability in self-managing one’s state of mind. Therefore, mental health denotes the optimal level of functioning, both at personal and interpersonal levels. The National Mental Health Survey of India estimated the current prevalence of mental disorders in the age group of 18-29 years. Progression of mental disorders happens in the group of 13-17 years. This pandemic has baffled all psychological practitioners about the intensities of problems among the younger generation. I have witnessed narrations of suicidal ideation, procrastination, self-harm, disbeliefs, insecurities about finances, jobs, relationships, parental verbal, physical and sexual abuse, overthinking, loneliness, anxiety, insomnia, and the list seem endless among our Indian Youth. I am overwhelmed as to how as parental figures, educational heads, workspace authorities we negate the non-verbal signs coming from the adolescents. We judge them by their outward gestures and never involve their thoughts with ours. I am writing these personal experiential contents to make older population reflect on their thoughts and actions, as they have normalised all their negative patterns of behaviours, which they term as disciplinary gestures, although they are creating a claustrophobic environment for others.
The Online Challenge
Online work has been the new lifestyle and we all have adapted to its nuances and upliftments. We pat our shoulders as we overcome the working of Artificial Intelligence each day. We strive harder to learn the dynamics of augmented reality and we take pride in building our e-learning experiences and increase our relationships with our smart gadgets. But what about the real relationships that’s breathing around us? Are we taking time to enhance the same and study the varied perspectives from our own people who strengthens our identities? All this burden the mental health and develops an unseen vacuum among all developmental age groups. At this moment of social crisis that we are collectively viewing, it is noticeable that we are spending most of our time in social media and facing the upheavals of cybercrime, cyberbullying, family conflicts, etc. There has been a lack of community involvement and communication. Since we all have so much time to reflect and ponder, all the memories are coming to us in phases. That’s when the childhood trauma seems to be dominant as it affects our present adolescent or adult life. All the mistakes that we have perceived to have made from the past haunts us and makes our life lose its meaning and lowers our empowerment skills. The outcome of the same is a dysfunctional mental health paradigm that is stigmatised and ignored by our Indian society.
Kinds of Individuals
There are six kinds of individuals in the community that elucidate the adversities of mental health. The ‘Narcissistic’ type are people who think about themselves and are unable to take others’ perspectives. Therefore, they lack empathetic skills and believe that others are less competent than them. Another type is the ‘Controller’ who try to dominate others’ decisions, aspirations and actions. They revel in situations where they are part of the apex in solving conflicts of the surroundings. The third type of people are termed as ‘The Drama Magnet’ who feed on varied types of gossips and create fantasy-based contexts. They are prominent in putting others in situations that make them uncomfortable. The fourth type is called the ‘Energy Vampire’ who overwhelm others by absorbing their energies and develop conflicts and reflect negative vibes while putting down people. The fifth type is the ‘Compulsive Liar’ who choose to manipulate others and make them believe in guilt. The last type is defined as the ‘Green Eyed’ who mourn while visualising others’ positive outcomes and depict to be victimised while reducing others’ thoughts favourable about themselves. These extraordinary personalities in the society craft differing mental health dimensions that become hard to escape. Being aware of the individuality of people would lead in managing self and others.
Self Sabotage Behaviour
This lockdown has made me realise about a realistic concern that many youths faced in the sphere of mental health. It is termed as ‘Self Sabotage Behaviour,’ where the young are fearful about seeing change and uncertainty. Familiarization with situation feels comforting where an individual normalises the trauma. If the young are accustomed to be negated and ignored, they reinforce their thoughts of being victimised and get into the depth of ‘learned helplessness’ spheres. In this pattern, the young stabilise the thought that they cannot achieve or remain successful. Whenever these people accomplish their goals and move towards the success ladder, it leads them to feel overwhelmed and they start to let go of their dreams and goals as they believe that they cannot progress in life. They develop a thought-pattern by which they try to control their failure by accepting it with open arms and hence self-blame for all unfulfilled endeavours. These people always self-criticise themselves and do not approve their positive traits. When their efforts are applauded and new tasks are directed towards them, they procrastinate and fail to put their best foot forward. All this is because of the prevalent institutions that is functional in the lives of the young in the forms of family, schools, industries and other recognisable entities.
Towards Better Mental Health
As a mental health professional, there are some self-reflections that we all need to brainstorm about as a holistic unit. Family plays an important role in the Indian social structure as it symbolises culture and learning. It becomes toxic when the family forgets its role in terms of ‘scaffolding’ the newer generation by encouraging their strengths and not recognising only their weaknesses. It is needed that we familiarise our youth by our experiential stories of failures that breeds solutions at the end. We all have gone through different phases of life and it’s time to accept and educate the young about the trials and tribulations along with successes.
Today, every individual working at the micro level in the society are battling with mental health issues. Children are troubled by the lack of physical touch from scholastic institutions and mingling with peer groups while they are caught up within the troubled spaces of adults. Teenagers and adolescents are dwelling in a lonely planet filled with relationship insecurities, unemployment thoughts, scarcity of resources and overthinking. Adults are brooding about troubled jobs, managing personal relations and living in constant anxiety about overcoming the pandemic. Senior citizens are left to suffer the physical and mental health turmoil in isolation. So how do we help every age groups in our own way? It’s time we create community models as professionals to guide in healthy safe spaces for others to share their thoughts without being judged or let down. Field learning through experiences are important in understanding perspectives. Mental health is the prime concern at the moment and it doesn’t matter whether the individual resides in remote or in urban areas. Psychological health professionals should follow the community model, keeping the social crisis in mind where not everyone can afford therapy. It’s more humane to reach out to the deeper levels of the society with the expertise of psychology using regional languages as the media of communication. Families should come together in transforming every member and involve them in problem-solving strategies and solution-focussed approaches to fight the pandemic. Policymakers should make societal guidelines stringent for everyone to follow. Educational institutions should make social and life skills the utmost priority as in the long run, more than curriculum, the personal potentials to fight back would help. Tomorrow our youth may face bigger challenges, and so we have to make them self-sufficient and not dependent on us.
There are certain remedies I wish to suggest as a Counsellor and Educator while working with Indian community values. Mindfulness should be engraved into our daily working as it releases components of self-awareness and emotional regulation. Spirituality blended with consciousness delivers us from inhumane to humane practices. The ability to grasp and absorb newer conflicts or challenges would rejuvenate our abilities to bounce back and foster resilience. Favourable self-talk in applying positive affirmations are needed in building self-trust and faith in one’s actions that further uplifts the personality. We should take feedback efficiently and move forward while learning to work with rejection. Physical activities would release the happy hormone called ‘Oxytocin’ that is known as the love hormone which we can generate for our environment to build trust and social diversity. Thus, mastering one’s social and emotional intelligence would establish self-reflective tendencies. Each one functioning in unity should believe in knowing one’s worth and draw well-being. It’s relevant to love and care for oneself because if we are unable to treasure our existence and see ourselves through the outer world, we can never form a holistic self-concept.
We have everything in abundance and that’s our human resource. Let’s not take artificial intelligence take over human relationships. When we were created, we were given innate tendencies to love without boundaries. Today we are blinded by the materialistic pleasures and personal expectations. These pandemic reflections have taught us life’s important lessons, that is, to value all that we have before it becomes extinct - our individuality and mental willpower. Unless we appreciate our weaknesses, we will never be able to see our strengths. Unpredictability is the essence of life, and instead of asking ‘why it happened,’ if the focus shifts to ‘what next?’ then it will give us a new motive to live. We tend to blame the world for our present state, instead we need to see our flaws and transform them into opportunities for growth. As I walk from my workspace towards my home, I come across many people. A few are craving for food, a few for education, a few for healthcare, a few for shelter, a few for employment, a few for clothes. Behind these apparent needs hide the initially invisible mental health pandemic. We ignore these features as we move away from them telling ourselves that it’s not our responsibility. I suggest each one reading this to self-monitor actions, recreate thoughts and generate new behaviours to invent a global community in tackling mental health.∎
Roseline Florence Gomes is a professor of Psychology & Counsellor at Jyoti Nivas College Autonomous, Bangalore.
