When a senior Islamabad police officer reportedly took his own life last month, shock and sorrow rippled across the country. What followed, however, was revealing: instead of compassion, a state TV journalist branded him “a coward and a fool.” The backlash laid bare a truth Pakistan avoids: that we still treat mental illness as weakness rather than an affliction that demands care and policy.
At a recent national conference, experts revealed that one in three Pakistanis (34% of the population) suffers from a psychological disorder, far higher than the global average. Depression and anxiety are endemic. Around 1,000 people die by suicide annually, while 10% of the population struggles with drug addiction. Yet mental illness remains cloaked in shame. Families hide it; patients stay silent. The culture of silence has become lethal.
This crisis is manmade, shaped by decades of inequality, corruption and dysfunction. Inflation, unemployment, and collapsing purchasing power have turned survival itself into a psychological burden. Women, bound by patriarchy and abuse, suffer twice as much from depression. For the young, over 60% of Pakistan’s population, despair grows as joblessness and an obsolete education system crush ambition. What should have been a demographic dividend has become a generation in distress.
Pakistan spends less than 0.5% of its health budget on mental health. The country has fewer than 100 psychiatrists for 240 million people, roughly one per half-million citizens, when the WHO standard is one per 10,000. Services are concentrated in cities, unreachable for most. There is no national suicide-prevention programme, no counselling in schools, and no credible rehabilitation network.
Only this year did parliament begin debating a Mental Health (Amendment) Bill: a start, but still far from the national strategy experts have long urged. For decades, successive governments have outsourced mental health to NGOs and helplines while focusing on “visible” issues. It is a catastrophic miscalculation.
Mental illness is not a moral failing. It is a mirror reflecting the fractures of a society stretched beyond endurance. There can be no recovery, no progress, and no health without mental health. *