The Mental Health Crisis We Ignore

“I had self-harm ideation during my JEE preparation. My parents cared enough to take me to a psychiatrist, solely so that it wouldn’t affect my exam,” said a student. Every week, the medical officer sends at least two students who come to him with weakness and sleeplessness manifesting from a recent breakup, to me. “She hasn’t talked to me for three days after that. I wonder if someone else is with her,” a final year student said, breaking down. “I don’t have any female friends here, and my male friends would make a joke out of my situation, so I bottle up all my emotions,” said a student talking about his recent rejection. As alarming as it is to hear these accounts, it is equally heartening that they are willing to talk about it to a professional, that they are ready to learn how to cope.

At the same time, considerable efforts are being made by the state to strengthen mental health support on campuses. Public facilities like TeleMANAS, suicide helplines, private platforms like YourDost, and several AI-based applications are constantly in the news for one development or another. Some institutions have also hired mental health professionals on campus. Yet, we find ourselves going in circles, asking what more needs to be done to “mitigate” these issues.

The problem lies in how we only look at one side of the coin, as though mental health and distress are conditions that require a “cure”. Distress is a universal experience. The reasons and intensity may vary, but the feeling, more or less, is the same. For one student, it may stem from self-perceived academic incompetence while for another, a failed relationship. The goal is not to eliminate it, but to regulate it, to keep it within tolerable levels so that it does not consume a life that still has so much ahead of it.

Getting students to come forward and talk is the real issue that needs to be addressed. As long as students are not taught that it is okay to speak up when things get too heavy, they will not believe that it is. And as long as they are not also taught compassion for others and for themselves, they never will.

Spending years and lakhs on an exam and its preparation is not inherently a bad idea. But believing that life will fall into place once you clear it, things will change dramatically, that happiness is waiting on the other side, is where the line gets crossed. This is what psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar called the “arrival fallacy” — the false belief that reaching a major milestone will bring lasting happiness. When the mind has never been prepared to handle the inevitable setbacks that follow, everything that once felt tolerable will suddenly feel insurmountable.

Perhaps it is time to shift focus. To move from supply-driven support systems where help is made available and students are expected to find their way to it, toward something more demand-driven where students themselves are equipped to recognise what they need and ask for it. While we prepare them for an exam, why not prepare them for life? A life that does not unfold in straight lines, but in spirals and one where they get to decide whether that spiral moves upward or downward. The resilience, the emotional vocabulary, the simple ability to say, “I am not okay”, these are not soft skills peripheral to education. They are, arguably, the most important thing a young person can leave campus with.

The classroom taught them to solve for x. It is time it also teaches them to sit with uncertainty, to lose gracefully, to ask for help without shame and to extend the same compassion to themselves that we so easily ask them to extend to their academics. The big fish-little pond effect can never be fully avoided. There will always be a bigger fish. But what we can do is tell them that a pufferfish and a jellyfish each have their own remarkable abilities regardless of the size of the pond they find themselves in. Comparison is inevitable, losing yourself to it is not.