Daily Times

Last week, a bachelors of medical sciences student at Jamshoro’s Liaqat University of Medical and Health Sciences (LUMHS) was found dead in his hostel room in suspicious circumstances. While investigations are still underway, there’s a strong chance that the student took his own life as a result of depression. Though initial reports suggest that the deceased’s depression could be linked to his brother’s illness, the incident must not be treated as an isolated occurrence.

Depression among college and university students in campuses across the country is a real problem. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough debate happening on the causes of depression among students, and the possible remedies. Academic pressure and abusive behaviour of members of the faculty is one cause, as evident in the suicide of an engineering student Institute of Engineering and Fertilizer Research (IEFR) in the month of October last year. However, the problem is deeper, and a whole range of factors related to the prevailing environments at homes and campuses is responsible. This was evident in the suicide of a female student reported late last year at a private university in Lahore. That incident also exposed to the poor state of counselling facilities at our campuses. While such services are hard to find on public-sector campuses, most private institutions that charge skyrocketing fees for their education services lack decent counselling services.

The lack of attention paid to this crucial aspect of ensuring a conducive learning environment is criminal. The provincial authorities need to undertake an audit of existing facilities across colleges and universities, so that a base-line can be established and measures proposed for improvement of services.

While this will take care of a glaring gap in service delivery, there is also a need to assess how the structure of our education system contributes to such mental health issues in the first place. This is crucial because no amount of sincere efforts at addressing gaps in service delivery will be enough to address the root cause of depression induced by academic concerns and the resulting suicidal tendencies among students.

A series of incidents reported from Chitral district in August last year can serve as an example to show how structural problems take a toll on students’ wellbeing from well before they enter higher education institutions. Three teenagers took their lives in separate incidents in the district over poor results in their board examinations. This shows how students with diverse outlooks get to suffer as a result of a singular focus on scoring good marks and earning higher grades in exams. When the education system ties academic achievement singularly to grades scored in a comprehensive exam taken once a year, it puts students through inhumane ordeals and promotes cut-throat competition. This kind of a system pays absolutely no attention to the fact that students do not enter our education institutions from a perfect world. They bring with them baggage that it not of their own making – the income-levels of families they’re born in and the ethno-linguistic and religious communities they’re identified with (by none other than state institutions themselves). Therefore, a central task of a humane education system must be to take stock of these differences among students and to prepare them accordingly for standardised exams. Such a system can exist only in the public-sector due to the sheer amount of work and resources needed to bring it into being. It is an uphill task, but it is a matter of wellbeing of our future generations. We must not settle for anything less than a perfect education system to ensure that. *

Published in Daily Times, January 22^nd 2019.