Mental health is one of the topics which people rarely talk about. Especially, here in Nepal, it is considered taboo. If anyone is genuinely going through something, people would just prefer to mock it off rather than trying to understand what a person may have gone through.
This is really a sick mentality. This clear lack of understanding on this subject manner is prevalent not only here in Nepal but in almost every Third-world country. It’s understandable as these countries have other important priorities especially related to livelihood rather than focusing on mental health issues.
It is one of the things which is taken for granted almost every time. We can see the spiking number of suicides in lockdown amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Even after going through all these numbers and statistics, our policymakers have little to no priority over this issue. We rarely find any genuine research being done regarding why do people commit suicide.
There are very less people who actually come out with the problem and going to a psychotherapist is even rare. Even if you take some medicines regarding mental health issues, people clearly start judging you.
It’s understandable that it takes time to change the perception of the society as there still are some radical viewpoints even in so-called developed countries. So, this issue would last for a long period of time even in the future no matter how much we try to change the mentality.
The least we could do to raise awareness of this issue is through young generations. Raising questions like what mental health really is and why does it matters? We do study reproductive health in schools but we should understand the fact that mental health could never be disassociated with reproductive health.
Along with the physical changes in the adolescent period, the mental scope of the teenager also changes and it does bring complications. If we make sure to address the mental health issues of students right from the schools, we could make a certain changes in perceptions regarding this issue.