Here’s a way to mental health support for students.

Young people in India in the 15-29 age group have suicide rates that are far higher than global averages: twice as high for men and six times for women.

Timely mental health support could save their lives. Unfortunately, college students tend to refrain from seeking such support when they suffer from depression. Research has shown there is a stigma attached to mental health issues, which prevents young people from acknowledging their suffering and makes them shun help-seeking.

A solution based on a web-platform intervention that normalises mental health issues may help. This web intervention was found to work more effectively in alleviating stigma attached to help-seeking than other commonly available interventions.

In the space of mental health care, interventions are generally of two kinds. The first is those that encourage speaking to a healthcare professional anonymously when one is feeling low, such as yourdost. The second is those that do not mention distress but speak of overall well-being, a skill that can be developed as a tool for resilience, such as healthymindsinnovation (HMI) by Dr Richard Davidson of University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Resilience is the differential capacity to persist in the face of difficulties; those with high resilience can cope better with stress than those with low resilience. HMI targets not only those who are suffering from mental health issues but helps all individuals to develop well-being skills for resilience. On the other hand, talk therapy on conditions of anonymity offered by platforms such as yourdost and 7cups is primarily targeted at struggling individuals coping with anxiety, depression or grief.

Both are primarily micro-level interventions that put the onus on help-seeking students.

The stigma attached to mental health signifies that the external world perceives those with mental health issues to be dangerous, violent and lacking self-control.

Such stigma could result in discriminatory practices targeting the affected individuals, like the recent purported case of more than 100 employees being fired when they responded in an employee survey reporting stress. While the firm later claimed this to be a marketing gimmick, it’s the fear of situations like this that gives rise to the stigma attached to mental health.

Until 2017, attempting suicide was a criminal offence in India; and it is well-known that suicidality often comes as an offshoot of clinical depression. It is, therefore, not surprising that students suffering from mental health challenges choose to suffer in silence rather than invite external pressures that could exacerbate their condition further.

A shadow social marketing strategy that does not focus on mental health issues at all could take the pressure off this group. This is the approach used in the web intervention named Cocoon.

Cocoon provides an apparent (hence, shadow) offering of career-related services as the main value proposition, with the real offering of normalising mental health services as incidental for those in need in high-pressure academic environments.

We cannot expect affected students to seek help in university spaces that remain largely stigma-ridden over time. The final responsibility lies with university administrators, faculty and staff to purge the socio-educational environment of external stigma and nurture one that interventions such as Cocoon promote.

Our universities ought to be willing to work on safe spaces that encourage help-seeking and not simply provide some minimal mental health support services. We must be willing to create a stigma-free environment for our students before we ask them to come forward and seek help for their mental health issues.

About authors: Paromita Goswami is Professor of Marketing and Social Innovation, School of Management and Entrepreneurship and Jaideep Ghosh is Professor, Department of Decision Sciences, Operations Management, and Information Systems, School of Management and Entrepreneurship at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, visit https://findahelpline.com/i/iasp.

This is an abridged version. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.