In what is a historic step to protect the mental well-being of young people, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a new measure to restrict children under 16 from using social media. Not only has the PM voiced strong concerns about the negative impact of social media on young citizens, he has warned companies managing social media platforms to enforce these age restrictions or face substantial penalties for non-compliance. “The onus will be on social media platforms to demonstrate they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access.

The onus won’t be on parents or young people.” Though his clarification that penalties would not apply to parents and young users is open for debate, the Australian PM has touched a bundle of raw nerves, of challenges faced in addressing mental health well-being. The public health concern is voiced in an increasing number of countries which recognise benefits associated with the use of the Internet, computers, smartphones but also acknowledge that excessive use often has negative health consequences. “Interest in mental health is higher than it has ever been because of Covid-19,” says Dr Mark van Ommeren, head of WHO’s Department of Mental Health in Geneva.

The figures he shared from the WHO World Mental Health Report: Transforming Mental Health for All are as shocking as they are a wake-up call for nations, communities and families alike: About 1 in 8 people worldwide ~ nearly 1 billion ~ live with a mental health disorder; suicide accounts for 1 in every 100 deaths and is a leading cause of adolescent death. Yet on average, governments spend just 2 per cent of their health budgets on mental health care, and low- and middle-income countries spend just 1 per cent. Roughly half the world’s population lives in a country with one psychiatrist for 200,000 or more people. Child and adolescent mental health specialists in many low and middle-income countries are “almost non-existent.” As a result, most people living with mental illness do not get care. For example, 71 per cent of individuals with psychosis go untreated.

In many lowand middle-income countries, essential psychotropic drugs are often unavailable or unaffordable. Depression, anxiety, bipolarity, schizophrenia, suicidal and self-harmful behaviour have become an accepted part of modern day living. It is a long, fierce battle being fought in families affected by mental health issues, with World Mental Health Day commemorated every year on 10 October being a chilling reminder of this grim reality. Mental health today is an integral component of health. In countries like India with multiple ancient spiritual and religious legacies, the domain of mental health and well-being gets complicated: faith and belief are often in a face-off with science, research and pharmacology.

In ‘Addressing Mental Health in India’, WHO reported these findings: The prevalence of mental health conditions was higher among males (13.9 per cent) than females (7.5 per cent). However, mood disorders were higher among women. Males in the age group of 30– 49 years were the most affected by mental illnesses. Residents of urban metros had a greater prevalence of mental disorders and persons from lower income quintiles had a greater prevalence of one or more mental disorders. Of those over 18 years, 0.9 per cent was at high risk and 0.7 per cent at moderate risk of suicide.

The highest-risk groups were females (1.14 per cent) compared to males (0.66 per cent), those living in urban metros (1.71 per cent) and those between the ages of 40– 49 years. The prevalence of mental health disorders in the 13-17 age group was 7.3 per cent. Depressive disorders were the commonest conditions. Nearly 9.8 million young Indians aged between 13 and 17 years were in need of active interventions. The prevalence was significantly higher (13.5 per cent) in urban metros compared to rural areas (6.9 per cent) in this age group. Treatment gap for all types of mental health problems ranged from 28 to 83 per cent.

It was 85.2 per cent for common mental disorders, 75.5 per cent for psychoses, 70.4 per cent for bipolar affective disorders and 86.3 per cent for alcohol use disorder. With the World Mental Health Report 2022 declaring mental health is the leading cause of disability, Dr Mark Van Ommeren explained, “WHO does advanced calculations in coming up with a conclusion like that. And these calculations include a number of different sources of information. One of them is that for an individual, when they have a mental health condition such as depression, it’s actually very impairing. At many workplaces, the leading cause for people not being at work is because of mental health conditions, although that’s often not said. Indeed, only less than one in three people around the world are getting care for their mental health condition.”

When questioned by Vismita Gupta-Smith of WHO Communications on the impact of the pandemic on mental health, Dr Ommeren said, “The pandemic has been very hard on people’s lives, and it has really shone a light on mental health. The rates have gone up in the first year of the pandemic for anxiety and depression, about 25 per cent, meaning that about 25 per cent more people than before had depression or anxiety, which is enormous. In terms of people with pre-existing severe mental illness, they were more likely to catch the virus and more likely to be severely ill from the virus and in fact, even more likely to die from the virus.” Mental health, in the Indian context, is enmeshed with spiritual and religious legacies, which in turn were integrated with educational and belief systems over the centuries. “Our life-blood is spirituality.

If it flows clear, if it flows strong and pure and vigorous, everything is right; political, social, any other material defects, even the poverty of the land, will all be cured if that blood is pure,” declared Swami Viveka nanda, among the greatest of India’s reformer-intellectuals. His lecture titled ‘The Future of India’ (complete works Volume 3) is in sharp contrast to modern prognosis, diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues. Swami Vivekananda, like Swami Dayanand Saraswati and Sri Aurobindo, was highly critical of the system of national education which was depriving people of spiritual practices in their lives and education. “It had a tremendous disadvantage, so enormous that the good things were all weighed down. In the first place, it was not a man-making education; it was merely and entirely negative education.

Any training based on negation is worse than death. Fifty years of such education had not produced one original man,” declared Vivekananda, emphasizing the importance of character-building of students and teachers, with a focus on their physical-mental education and development. The Mother, often hailed as the Saint of Pondicherry, wrote in the Bulletin in November 1951, “Of all lines of education, mental education is the most widely known and practised, yet except in a few rare cases there are gaps which make it something very incomplete, and in the end quite insufficient.” The Mother was integrating spirituality, education, mental and physical health as Sri Auro bindo had detailed. “Generally speaking,” wrote the Mother, “schooling is considered to be all the mental education that is necessary. And when a child has been made to undergo, for a number of years, a methodical training which is more like cramming than true schooling, it is considered that whatever is necessary for his mental development has been done.

Nothing of the kind. Even conceding that the training is given with due measure and discrimination and does not permanently damage the brain, it cannot impart to the human mind the faculties it needs to become a good and useful instrument. The schooling that is usually given can, at the most, serve as a system of gymnastics to increase the suppleness of the brain. From this standpoint, each branch of human learning represents a special kind of mental gymnastics, and the verbal formulations given to these various branches each constitute a special and well-defined language.” The Mother, explaining five principal phases of mental education, wrote:

(1) Development of the power of concentration, the capacity of attention;

(2) Development of the capacities of expansion, widening, complexity and richness;

(3) Organisation of one’s ideas around a central idea, a higher ideal or a supremely luminous idea that will serve as a guide in life;

(4) Thought-control, rejection of undesirable thoughts, to be – come able to think only what one wants and when one wants and

(5) Development of mental silence, perfect calm and a more and more total receptivity to inspirations coming from the higher regions of the being.” Both Swami Vivekananda and the Mother highlighted integrated transformation through education towards developing physically-mentally-spiritually strong students rooted in their cultural traditions. Reading the Mother’s Bulletin in today’s time, when IT and Artificial Intelligence are ruling the roost, is another wakeup call. Everyday life is the best school of all, wrote the Mother, for it brings varied, complex, unexpected experiences, problems to be solved, clear and striking examples and obvious consequences. The messages are clear: mental health conditions and well-being are to be addressed with faith and reason, with mental education and modern healthcare going hand in hand, driven by belief and value systems that are universal and eternal.

(The writer is a researcherauthor on history and heritage issues, and a former deputy curator of Pradhanmantri Sangrahalay)