Sharing – A crisis within: Over 50% mental health patients waited at least a year for professional support
This is a global crisis:
More than half of people seeking mental healthcare in India waited over a year before accessing professional support, while 56.2% experienced thoughts of self-harm.
This is yet another example of there not being enough resources available for mental healthcare, and the wait making conditions worse and worse. Here you have people struggling with thoughts of self-harm, waiting for over a year to get any kind of help. And look, there are no easy answers here. A few hundred thousand trained therapists are not going to suddenly appear next week and fill this gap. So, as societies and individuals, we need to figure out ways to create communities that can provide some level of support, and do everything we can to eliminate the known external sources of mental health issues: poverty, racism, oppression, pollution, violence, etc. We need to figure out how we can support the people around us in small ways and connect as fellow human beings instead of seeing others as less than.
We know there are things we can do to lessen mental health struggles, and we know there are things we do that cause more harm that we could stop doing.
Statistics like this should push us to figure out how to take steps to improve things in the lives of people around us, but I fear we live in an era where the people without access to care could disappear, and a lot of people around the world would be glad to not have to listen to people talk about mental health any longer.
That’s inhumane and unacceptable.
