Based in India and working in financial services?Answer our quick survey on the topic of mental health in India
"How confident would you be talking to your manager at work if you felt you were suffering from stress, anxiety or depression?"While the subject of mental health is sparking conversations and raising awareness around the world, the stigma surrounding the issue is still prevalent in India.
According to
Namrata Rana and
Utkarsh Majmudar for
The Economic Times in April this year, the medical focus in India tends to
prioritise disease management and its cure, with mental health “mostly ignored because it has no real physical manifestation”.
“Misunderstanding and stigma surrounding mental health are widespread, leading to exclusion from the
healthcare system”, say
Rana and
Majmudar. They also note that mental health is largely ignored by big Indian companies, despite around 80% of India’s top 200 firms investing in health and education as part of their corporate social responsibility (
CSR) commitments. These firms are mostly deploying their
CSR funds “for disease prevention and management only”.
Those firms “that are already investing in health and education as part of
CSR can insist that schools should employ
counsellors for students and that hospitals create mental health departments”, suggest
Rana and
Majmudar.
The article quotes
Neerja Birla, founder and chairperson of
Mpower, a social
enterprise that helps address mental health issues. She says that awareness building and talking to people in need of help is a good starting point, because “many mental health issues are a result of loneliness”. Believing that mental health should be viewed with a sense of urgency,
Birla says that technology, while connecting us, can also create “islands of loneliness, anxiety and stress”.
Economic Times article
Work in progressAn article in the
Financial Express highlights the fact that, although India’s
Mental Healthcare Act 2017 is “one of the most progressive legislations on mental health globally”, it possesses few resources to help those in need.
The Act provides “for mental
healthcare and services for persons with mental illness and to protect, promote and fulfil the rights of such persons during delivery of mental
healthcare and services and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto”.
Yet, the article points to figures from the World Health Organization that
show that India had just 0.3 psychiatrists per 100,000 population in 2014. This compares with 3.49 in Brazil, 1.71 in China and 12.4 in the US. “Psychologists working in mental health were fewer still, with 0.07 per 100,000”.
The article refers to
The Lancet Commission on mental health, published in October 2018, that estimates that costs to the global economy in relation to
healthcare and lost productivity exacted by mental illness will reach US$
16tn by 2030. According to
Financial Express, this will “bring India’s problem into even starker relief”, adding that by 2020 an estimated 20% of the Indian population will be suffering from a form of mental illness.
The article says that thousands of people suffering from mental illness are left without recourse to treatment because of a “sporadic and inadequate” policy response to data showing that India is the “most depressed country in the world”. They are “living under conditions of extreme insecurity, with undernutrition and violations of their human rights”. It calls for the government to make mental health services a key part of universal health coverage.
Financial Express article
How can companies help?
Some companies in India are stepping up to their responsibilities by “investing in improving the mental health of their people”, according to
Brinda Sarkar and
Sreeradha D
Basu in an article for the
Economic Times.
Accenture, a management consulting and professional services firm, and American Express have introduced initiatives to help promote good mental health, they say.
Accenture has been conducting mental
wellness workshops and has an
onsite counsellor support programme, where “
counsellors visit eight offices across five cities in the country on a fortnightly basis”. Meanwhile, American Express is “actively driving more conversations about workplace mental health” and the firm has a happiness coach, who is a “trained clinical psychologist who conducts stress management and work-life balance sessions”.
Accenture and American Express are not alone. According to a
press release by insurance firm Willis Towers Watson, referencing a study entitled
India health and wellbeing study, around 80% of
organisations in the country took at least one action towards improving the mental health of their employees last year.
Sudesh Shetty, head of health and benefits at Willis Towers Watson, adds: “Stress has a direct link to workplace performance and productivity. While some employers in India have already taken steps to develop a stress or mental health strategy, more focused effort is required to identify the specific reasons of stress and design interventions aimed at addressing them and improving the emotional and mental health of employees. Almost 60% companies do not use data/matrix to measure the stress of the workforce and the leading causes, and that surely is an area of improvement.”
Economic Times article
While efforts to push mental health higher up the corporate agenda are being taken by some in the Indian business community, there is clearly still a long way to go. So how can more businesses encourage mental health wellbeing and help end the stigma? Leave your comments below.
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