Life is much busier now, people are more stressed, and be it the schools or the workplace, the amount of mental work has increased exponentially.
Working Towards a Happier Future In this day and age of technology and everything new, we seem to still be stuck on the old idea of mental health. A study conducted by the World Health Organization in 2015 shows that one in five Indians may suffer from depression in their lifetime, equivalent to 200 million people. Now due to various factors like stigma, lack of awareness and limited professional help, only a fraction of these people are being helped. The majority of the populace when asked what mental health according to them is, stated terms like ‘retard’, ‘stupid’, ‘mad’. Now, it is not their fault that they think like this, the older part of the population grew up in a time where stress was low and life was slow paced.
10 | Dopamine • July’19
But our brains can work at such a pace only for so long before tiring, and rest isn’t an option. There are deadlines to reach, projects to complete and tests to study for and therefore, our lives have become so hectic that we often forget to take a break. The world changed, our mentality didn’t. Take a minute and think of the following situation: You were playing with your friends one day and ended up bruising your knee, you hid it as fast as you could, what if someone saw it? You rushed home, hiding your wound from everyone, you don’t want to be judged. You try to bandage it yourself, try to hide the pain because you know that this pain is much better than the one you’d get if the society knew of your injury. Seems weird, right? Why would anyone be so paranoid because of a simple physical injury? Well, now replace that with depression, anxiety or any other mental disorder. Get it? This is the society we live in today. One where you have to hide your pain because it’s better than being judged.
