86: Spotlight: Mental Health, the hidden crisis amongst Indian students: A conversation with Dr Dr Lata Dhir Prof of Organisational Behaviour & Leadership SPJIMR

WARNING: THE INFORMATION BELOW MAY BE TRIGGERING1.64 lakhs, a daily average of 450 or 18 per hour…..That is the number of deaths due to suicides in India in 2021The statistics for death by suicide amongst young people is worse. Not surprising then that this is the third leading cause of death amongst young adults and a significant problem amongst college students in India. Mental health can bye impacted due to a myriad of factor amongst young people. The two big issues that stand out are a) Stigma around mental health, it is a taboo subject that individuals and families are reluctant to engage with. 2) An education system that is not knowledge oriented but exam focused - testing students on their ability to ace the system.In a post independence India there has been a rise in social capital attached to educational attainment (because it leads to acceptable jobs, financial and material gains). Indian students face some of the toughest competitive examinations in the world. And just to share an example - with less than 1% acceptance rate the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) exam is said to be tougher than getting in Harvard. A million students, yes that is right 1 MILLION students apply for the 13000 seats. The pandemic of course has exacerbated the issue. Peer pressure, all consuming access to media, parental pressure, fear of failure, lack of access to opportunities all compound the issue. With prominent Bollywood celebrities and more young people speaking about the issue - there has been some progress. But, by and large the issue remains a taboo and largely undiagnosed.In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with Dr Lata Dhir Prof of Organisational Behaviour & Leadership and Group Head of Design Thinking at SPJIMR about the deep challenges we face in addressing this hidden crisis. Lata is deeply passionate about helping create the structures and safe spaces to support young people and proactively address mental health issues. She believes this is her life’s mission - her why?If you would like to learn more, listen here Memorable Passages from the podcast👉🏾 Good morning. I'm excited to be a part of this whole journey. How are you doing? 👉🏾 Who am I? Okay, I am a professor of Organisational behaviour and Leadership, at SPJIMR, one of the top schools in India. That’s my formal introduction. And I'm a psychologist. But my major, major passion lies in mental health. And that's something that I'm really passionate about and that's maybe the ‘why’ for most of the work that I do.👉🏾 It's a plethora of things, right? Generally, when you think of saying that you're a professor, in a traditional institute or a college, you are mainly teaching, right? Teaching, of course, is a core, but there's a lot of research that we need to work on, on the work that we present in classrooms, case studies that we write, articles that we need to publish. That's one part of the whole process. We do a lot of management development programs for organisations. The academia industry kind of connections and meet up, become extremely important if you need to really solve real-life problems in the world. So that's where we collaborated a lot with industries, sectors across India. We do consulting work with them. Sometimes we write a book also .👉🏾Thank you. A very, very interesting person and a very interesting organisation as you know. It’s a completely Indian-based genesis in...