Daily Times

Poverty can be felt from a single glance across every nook and cranny of Pakistani streets and roads. Scenes of children, who should have been enrolled in the schools, clad in rags forced to beg on the streets are obtrusive, to say the least. There are families of ten to fifteen members living in a single room, who neither have a concrete roof over their head nor access to basic amenities, such as clean drinking water, good sanitation, health and hygiene. The situation gets so bad at times that individuals are forced to be deprived of any let alone adequate and healthy food, thereby, leading to malnutrition.

It is disillusioning to note that there is an interconnection of poverty with unemployment and a lack of access to basic education and health facilities. Poverty also characterises a mental trauma amongst the individuals in society, which requires immediate attention. The psychological impression of desperation, frustration and depression is carried with poverty, whereby a scenario of poverty is inherited from one generation to another in which the people are deprived of accessing basic food, clothing, shelter and health facilities. People living on either one or no meal per day are overwhelmed with a feeling of having an ill-fate, which induces a sense of pessimism, leading to emotional and behavioural patterns; engendering mental trauma in the long run. Victims undergo a depressed cognitive development for suffering through poverty over an extended period of their life.

There is an interconnection of poverty with unemployment and lack of access to basic education and health facilities.

The youth of Pakistan is subjected to an alarming risk of mental health issues ensuing from poverty. Pakistan is generally the home to the greater proportion of youth in the world; labelling it as the second-youngest nation after Afghanistan in the South Asian region. According to the National Human Development Report of 2018, 64 per cent of the population of Pakistan falls in the age bracket below 30 years and suffers from the crisis attached to being in the lower-middle income group. This income group of our society has inadequate access to political, social, and economic participation required to handle the challenges of mental health. Even the access to community support for the lower-middle income bracket is less thereby succumbing to depression, and drug abuse.

Poverty entails a direct adverse effect on the functioning of the brain, whereby research dicated a direct link between poverty and inhibition of the cognitive growth of children and adolescents. It slows the capability of children and adolescents to retain information in their memory for a long time; to pay attention to it and solve problems effectively. Hence, it hinders the ability of both children and adults to tackle the mental trauma; resulting from extreme poverty in all dimensions of their lives.

Considering the grave scenario of the mental health issues emerging from poverty as discussed above, it can be asserted that mental health needs should be prioritised in Pakistan to create a preventive treatment for overcoming the adverse impact of poverty. There is a dire need for the government, social welfare institutes and educational institutes to play a prime role in prioritising mental healthcare solutions. The poorer youth, in particular, should be counselled from an early stage to channel their behavioural responses, and emotions positively rather destructively. It will motivate them to invest in hard efforts, time and energy to improve their living standards rather than becoming a far entrenched victim of this vicious cycle.

The writer can be reached at aiyza.javaid@gmail.com