SRINAGAR: For Aayat Hameed, a resident of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), seeking help from a mental health expert became necessary after consulting several doctors in the region’s main city. She was struggling with bouts of unspecified anxiety, random palpitation attacks, and occasional but strong suicidal thoughts. A psychiatrist diagnosed her with acute depression.
On a recent hot summer day, Hameed was among numerous patients visiting a mental health clinic in Srinagar, where she had been undergoing rounds of counseling along with prescription medication.
“I realized seeing a psychiatrist or reaching out to someone you trust really helps to deal with suicidal thoughts and depression,” Hameed said. She’s already recovered about 40 percent over a course of her one-month treatment, the young student added.
For over three decades, Kashmiris have been living through multiple crises. Violent armed insurrections, brutal counterinsurgency operations, unparalleled militarization and securitization, and unfulfilled demands for self-determination have fueled depression and drug addiction in the disputed region, experts say.
Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in the conflict that has left Kashmiris exhausted, traumatized, and broken. Nearly every one of the Kashmir valley’s 7 million people has been touched by violence.
The conflict has created two lost generations: the teenagers of 1989 who saw their childhoods collapse into warfare, and the teenagers of today who never had a childhood at all.
“The most basic building blocks of a healthy psyche — a sense of safety and security — are, and have been, under attack for decades in Indian occupied Kashmir,” said Saiba Varma, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, who studied psychiatric issues in Kashmir for her doctoral research.
Persistent Violence and Mental Health Issues in Indian Occupied Kashmir
The daily violence has ebbed sharply in recent years, and the Modi-led Indian government revoked the region’s semiautonomous status in 2019. Still, the invisible scars of Kashmir’s unending conflict are evident in the psychiatric sections of multiple hospitals where, on a routine day, hundreds seek help for mental illnesses and drug addictions.
A 2015 study by aid group Doctors Without Borders in collaboration with the University of Kashmir and the Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Srinagar showed “nearly 1.8 million adults (45 percent of the adult population) in the Indian occupied Kashmir are experiencing symptoms of mental distress, with 41 percent exhibiting signs of probable depression, 26 percent probable anxiety and 19 percent probable Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
The mental health care infrastructure has expanded from mere four psychiatrists and one main mental health care clinic in Srinagar in early 2000, to about 17 government-run clinics operated by over six-dozen professionals across the region today. But the mental health network is still overwhelmed.
Varma, the anthropologist, said the mental health crisis directly stems from social and political conditions in the region. “Ongoing militarization of everyday life has eliminated many cultural and religious practices of coping that Kashmiri people traditionally relied on, leaving them dependent on an overburdened and pharmaceuticalized health care system,” she said.
