Depression – An Existensial Life Crisis

The life crisis is fundamentally a cultural phenomenon, though it may be based upon a biological transition. Cultures may or may not emphasize physiological changes occurring during the life cycle, and thus they may increase or minimize the likelihood of experimental stress at such times. Life crisis may readily be analyzed at non cultural levels of explanation-for instance, as physiological events, or as sets of psychological problems. (Silverman, 1967).

Depression is not about “feeling Blue” or having a tough day. It is an illness.

Whether its causes are genetic or environmental we still end up in the same place. Depression has dramatic effect on the human, body, mind and spirit. (Lukasik, 2009).Depression is a serious mental health issue that affects an individual’s mood, feeling and degenerates interest in everything. It’s one of the major life crisis, which is not taken as seriously as its symptoms or adverse effect is not seen physically and public is not aware about its consequences.

It is given the name of existential life crisis as it is related to an inner war within one self where an individual doubts their decisions, purpose, and direction all in all they let you to a point where one questions your own existence in this world.

Standing with this issue of mental health where people think talking about depression and mental health issues ,other individuals might take them as a mentally challenged individual, which is not true and a huge misconception ,when all they need is someone to talk to and proper diagnosis or therapist.

As the key spokesperson I could start a small initiation project to work on a significant cause of mental health issue.

Objective:

• Educate and promote the importance of mental health in the community
•  Create a platform where people (psychiatrists, social entrepreneurs and the sufferers themselves) can share their experiences and normalize the taboo topic
•  Empowering the sufferers psychologically and emotionally by letting them artistically express their thoughts, through dancing, painting, writing or cooking
•  Educating the community by creating an understanding about what the sufferers of anxiety, depression and other mental disorders have to go through
• Overall, improve the involvement of the sufferers in the society

Causes:

•  Sufferers of Depression, Anxiety and other mental disorder
• Younger Generation with high aspirations who are an easy target for depression and anxiety
• Implementation process

Step 1: Draft a proposal and approach the Donor Agencies

Step 2: Share-Express-Learn Approach

Step 3: Collect feedback from the families through a standardized questionnaire and develop a report based on the responses of the sample approached for the Share-Express-Learn Workshop

Step 4: Present the results of the report to the senior executives of the Ministry of Nepal and executives from the partner agencies, so that they can propose sufficient budget allocation from the Government of Nepal.

Potential partners:

• World Health Organization (WHO)
• United Mission to Nepal (UMN)
• Ministry of Health
•  Centre for Mental Health and Counseling Nepal
•  Psychiatrics’ Association of Nepal (PAN)
• Promotional approach
•  Conduct fund raising events
• Newspaper, social networking sites and radio advertisements

Location

One city in each of the seven provinces of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal such that in totality they cover all the three geographical regions of the country.

The location can vary after receiving suggestions from the Centre for Mental Health and Counseling Nepal and Psychiatrics’ Association of Nepal because the workshop needs to be directed majorly towards those areas which are the potential hub of mental health problems.