14 per cent youngsters depressed in India due to COVID-19: UNICEF

UNICEF’s new ‘State of the World’s Children (SOWC)’ report has revealed that an estimated 14 per cent of India’s young people, aged 15-24 years, reported feeling depressed and uninterested. This comes against an international median of 19 per cent.

The first-ever SOWC report to focus on mental health says, "Fear. Loneliness. Grief. As the coronavirus pandemic descended on the world in 2019, these powerful emotions enveloped the lives of many millions of children, young people and families."

“In the early days especially, many experts feared they would persist, damaging the mental health of a generation. In truth, it will be years before we can really assess the impact of Covid-19 on our mental health.”

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The survey was carried out in 21 countries in the first half of 2021. It found that Indian youth are less willing to share their feelings of lowness.

“A median of 83 per cent of young people (15 to 24 years old) agreed it was better to deal with mental health problems by sharing experiences with others and seeking support; by contrast, only 15 per cent felt such problems were personal and should be dealt with on one’s own,” says the report.

“Among the 21 countries, India was the only exception, with 41 per cent of young people supporting the sharing option.”

The new revelation comes as a worry because it means that such youngsters are less likely to seek and get professional help and will, therefore, continue to suffer from undiagnosed mental health conditions.

The report analysed more than 13 per cent of the world’s adolescents, aged 10-19, live with a diagnosed mental disorder.

This represents 8.6 crore adolescents aged 15-19 and 8 crore adolescents aged 10-14.

The report argues that the unwillingness to talk about how these children feel rises from the social stigmatisation of mental health conditions. It also talks of instances of such stigma across the world.

It says, "Children do not learn to stigmatise mental health conditions on their own; many mirror behaviours they see in the world around them. For example, a cross-sectional study of 566 secondary school teachers in South India found that nearly 70 per cent believed that depression was weakness, not sickness, and that it was unpredictable but not dangerous."