Click to play videoNew Delhi: One in every four persons develop mental or behavioral disorders at some stage in life.
The statistics thrown up the World Health Report in 2001 showed that there are five suicides in India every minute and that depression will be the leading cause of premature deaths in industrial nations by 2020.
Many independant Indian studies were also grim enough to grab the Health Ministry's attention few years ago. In 2004, the ministry under its National Mental Health Program finally decided to mount a nation-wide campaign.
However, nothing on mental health has hit airwaves yet.
A professor at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Jaishri Jethwaney says, "In communication, we wanted to bring home the point that mental illness and depression is just a medical condition. There is no stigma attached."
A pilot was created to bring about awareness of the campaign on mental health. It has been two years since research was commissioned, pilots prepared, and a budget of Rs 10 crore allocated for the final execution, but the campaign has yet to take off.
Says psychiatrist and filmmaker, Dr Prevez Imam, "I told the officials of the Health Ministry right from the beginning that you have to involve me in terms of getting the concept right. But its been over a year now and I have never heard from them again."
The word from concerned officials in the Health Ministry is that the communication will hit airwaves in next three months, though the advertising agency to prepare the campaign still needs to be short listed.
Meanwhile, Health Secretary P K Hota has other contentions. "I was not willing to start this nation-wide campaign because what is the point of making the whole country aware that mental health patients need attention when there are no mental health service providing institutions in the country."
It's a fact that for a billion people there are only 3,000 psychologists and psychiatrists, an estimated 1,000 of whom left the country post 9/11.
India may not be infrastructurally equipped but communicators and social marketers are convinced that to sensitise people and involve the communities to accept their mentally ill, communication is imperative.
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