What's going on in your head?

1 in 3 people in Nepal are suffering from psychiatric problems. Over 90 percent of the population who needs mental health services has no access to treatment. Government spending is less than 1% of its total healthcare budget on mental health. Mental health services are concentrated in the big cities, with 0.22 psychiatrists and 0.06 psychologists per a population of 100,000. There are approximately only 50 psychiatric clinics and 12 counseling centers.  

Source  ~ MAINSTREAMING MENTAL HEALTH:CONTEXT, CHALLENGES AND CRITICALPATHWAYS  by IAN WALKER and SUDEEP UPRETY  Presentation for Idea Interchange, HERD June 14, 2016

On Thursday and Friday last week, the teaching and administrative staff of Shree Indreswori Secondary School got basic psycho-social counseling training. The psychosocial expert Ms. Sagun KC from Centre for Mental Health and Counselling –Nepal (CMC-Nepal), along with some our staff who got advanced training, taught us a lot of things about children’s as well as our own mental well-being.  Dr. Sagun KC and her office is working with the government to test the effectiveness of having a counseling center in the schools of Nepal. She informed us that Rasuwa and Gorkha districts’ public schools also have gone through similar program. They have a pilot counseling program going on. Our school was lucky enough, thanks to our head sir, to get a similar program. In collaboration with the CMC, our school will now have a wonderful counseling center which would provide a safe space for those who are going through any kind of worry, tension, learning problems, disinterest in studying, etc.

I feel that I was very fortunate to have taken this training. I would not have thought of getting such a training if I wasn’t here working in Melamchi as a Teach for Nepal fellow.

Teaching is hard. It is harder if your place of work is a semi-rural town far from your immediate family who lives in the city. It is equally hard for those who permanently live there and once aspired to get out but did not do so due to societal and familial responsibilities that weighed on their shoulders. It gets monotonous sometimes. Also, the scorching heat sucks the little energy that you mustered to get up and go to work.

In such conditions, gaining knowledge about how to love oneself before others, practicing meditations to calm down, and understanding our own minds was a beautiful gift to us teachers. One big take away from the training was what Ms. Sagun said about freeing our minds. She said something along these lines:

If so and so get a new job or loses one, if someone else’s wife gets pregnant, why should we take the stress and make it our topic of conversation. Similarly, if someone gives us a complement, why should we take that stress of wondering why they complemented or if they were joking. All that stress we should not take. If someone complements you just say thank you and move on. What people think of us is these people’s own stress, it is not our problem. It is their stress, not ours.

"अरुको तनाब  किन  आफुले  लिने ?"