A Possible Solution
The Conundrum with Placing Enough Counselors in Schools
One of the ways India can improve the situation of mental health among students is hiring a counselor for every school. But that’s easier said than done.
One of the problems is the availability of adequate professionals. As referenced earlier, there are only three psychiatrists for every million people in India, according to TLLLF.
One of the criteria that India has to meet is training large number of manpower for this work,” Kumar said. “You don't even have enough number of people even to do normal severe mental health work, for the severe mental health problems like schizophrenia, severe depression, any other issues. You don't have enough number of people.”
One of the reasons for this is that psychological issues are not given a priority, according to Kumar.
In a hospital, who receives treatment first? Whoever’s dying fastest. So the critical and emergency care units are given more importance and more people prefer to work in those areas, Kumar explained.
Even if there are professionals available, another problem arises: affordability.
“Schools cannot afford it,” Kumar said. “Cannot simply afford it because counseling is a specialized skill and then you need a personable trained and committed to that.”
He suggested that one thing schools can do is share a counselor between two or three schools, or a district.
Schools can also get around this by appointing a regular staff member as the counselor. For example, in Prabha’s school, her PT teacher was the counselor. But that wasn’t very helpful.
“So, sure his intentions were good,” Prabha said, “but whatever help he was trying to do, they weren’t professional.”
She said this makes it difficult for the appointed counselor to earn the students’ trust. But that’s difficult for another reason: there’s no privacy in Indian schools, Prabha said.
One of the simplest examples Prabha gave for this was how teachers get students to confess to something.
“In schools a very simple threatening mechanism that is used is, ‘confess up or I'm going to call up your parents,’” she said. “But situations like this demand little bit of sensitivity and discretion basically. So they need to be sensitive to that. I think Indian schools have a long way to go in that regard.”
So the people appointed as counselors in schools need to work hard to convey that their door is always open for students to come in and talk, and that anything said in that room stays between the counselor and the student.
Bringing it into the Curriculum
Another way to increase awareness of mental health is to bring it into the curriculum.
Prabha frequently mentioned during our conversations that she wished she had the ability to identify that she had a problem. She wishes she and her classmates knew about mental health so that they didn’t normalize depression and self-harm.
It’s not just mental health that the curriculum needs to include, according to Prabha.
“I think the curriculum has, not just in terms of depression but any other mental health issues, or things that have a social influence but are also personal, you know,” Prabha said, “like right from sex ed to depression, mental health, and adult education, it needs to be included in the curriculum. And it's not just enough that you include it, you need to make sure that it's disseminated properly.”
In Prabha’s school, there was a class called the “Adult Education Program”, she said, but she still has no idea what that class was about. She also had really hesitant teachers talk about sex education in her school who talked to the girls and boys separately.
To prevent issues like that, it is important to make sure that a trained professional talks about the subject. So a PT teacher isn’t going to cut it.
The Role of Teachers
Hariharan and Ravichandran proposed another solution: training the teachers in the schools to identify and help students struggling with mental health issues and getting them to develop a close relationship with the students.
“So they'll just come, they'll teach, and go,” Ravichandran said about the teachers in his school. “We didn't have a good interaction with any of them.”
Hariharan said the teachers in her school only cared about whether or not the student performs well in the board exams. To her, it didn’t seem like the teachers cared about each individual person because they never talked or reached out to her even though they knew she didn’t talk to people in class.
“I'd like to ask teachers to talk to students,” Ravichandran said. “Because the job for teacher is not to just come and teach, just write on the board and then go. They should know each and every student, they should know what they're doing, they should actually observe them.”
What if mental health is brought into the curriculum? What if teachers develop a close relationship with students, identify students with mental health issues? What if those teachers then guide students to a trained professional appointed in the school as a counselor who can talk to the students with guaranteed privacy? Maybe then students in India will slowly take their mental health back in their own hands.