Social media and mental health

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By Ramesh Kumaran

Paid Media

It would be more appropriate to term “social media” as PAID MEDIA because without spending money on them, they are not going to cover any news on mental health. In India, who cares about mental health to use social media to increase awareness about mental health? Out here, media is used for politics, sports, advertising and entertainment only. The media also does a great deal to discuss physical health issues or lifestyle diseases a lot more. Who is going to pay money to the media so that mental health is also included in this list? There are no private or government agencies to do so.

Articulate patients have no reason to read newspapers or news on digital media because there is no news that concerns them. No social security schemes, no help schemes, no health packages, no grievances appraisals. Similarly, no legal or occupational schemes that are going to appear in the media which can be a life-changing factor for them, a turning point from further relapse of the illness.

Psychiatrists and the Media

The psychiatrists who do very, very rarely appear in the media, talk more about the illness but says or does nothing to de-stigmatize it or reveal the shortcomings of their interviewing, toxic and protean side effects of the drugs, the uncontrolled method of their clinical trials etc.

In the US-based media, I have seen psychiatry movements led by patients, survivors and victims of the psychiatry industry in public places against the method of treatment adopted by psychiatry. We have nothing of that sort here in India. It is unimaginable. Here, the threshold of victimization is very high. There you have the CCHR, famous psychiatrists like Dr Peter Breggins, Dr Peter Gotzsche, Dr Thomas Szasz, Dr Glasse William, Dr Mark Hymann, Dr Niall McLaren etc. We don’t have psychiatrists of their stature. None of them, none anywhere near them. Their talks are quite revealing.

There are also notable contributions from editor Robert Whitaker who wrote, The Anatomy of an Epidemic. I would also like to mention one psychiatry survivor Laura Delano, whose blogs I used to read and talks I used to listen to, as well. I think she was the one who led the survivors’ movement in front of an important office in the US. We are living on the wrong side of the globe, if not the wrong planet.

3500 Psychiatrists for 1.3 Billion People

Lastly, I would like to mention one UK based Indian psychiatrist, whose videos I have liked. Not all of them, but some of them for sure because at times, he transcends the boundary between politics and religion and the talk becomes non-psychiatric. He talks about mental health for all. The disparity between psychiatric health and other physical illness, the statistics of mental health, the public health dimension of mental health. etc. His name is Dr Vikram Patel.

We do have our Srivastava committee report which I found on the net. I’m not sure if the government is following his guidelines or not. Anyway, his remarks were that India would take several decades to have a robust mental health system. For 1.3 billion people, we still have only 3000 to 3500 psychiatrists. And just 0.06% of the GDP spent on mental health. Rough estimates, without a census, indicate that 5% to 7% suffer from mental health issues. A report for a mental health survey and census was underway but has never resurfaced again.