Study on urban mental health in Delhi’s pocket rings alarm bells for adolescents

NEW DELHI: At least 34% of the 491 adolescents residing in an urban area in Delhi have been found to be suffering from common mental disorders, with 22.4% of them suffering from depression and 6.7% from anxiety.
This has been revealed in a study conducted by the Centre for Community Medicine and the department of psychiatry at AIIMS.

The study, conducted in Dakshinpuri Extension of Ambedkar Nagar, an urban resettlement colony in South East Delhi, also showed that those who were found to be suffering from common mental disorders were either smoking or consuming smokeless tobacco in some form or the other.At least 26 participants (5.3%) had used smoking tobacco (in the form of cigarettes, bidis or hookahs) and 25 participants (5.1%) had used smokeless tobacco such as gutkha, khaini or pan masala in their lifetime. Among users, the majority reported using smokeless tobacco almost daily (48%).
According to the Global Burden of Disease Study (2019), depression and anxiety are the top 10 leading contributors to disability adjusted life years (DALYs) among adolescents and young adults in the age bracket of 10-24 years.
The AIIMS study, published in the Indian journal of Psychiatry, on Monday, concluded that nearly a third of adolescents (15-19 years) who reside in urban Delhi have had an episode of depression or anxiety disorder in their lifetime. The higher prevalence of common mental disorders among adolescents in this area necessitates the need for preventive, promotive and curative mental health services.
The principal investigator of the study, Aftab Ahmad, said the prevalence of common mental disorders reported in the study (34%) is much more than the prevalence reported by the National Mental Health Survey in 2015-16 in the age bracket of 13-17 years. It was 7.3% then.
“However, the survey undertook an evaluation of only a few adolescents by MINI-Kid after the initial screening. This may have led to an underestimation of the actual burden of common mental disorders. The present study uses a validated diagnostic tool (MINI-Kid) for estimating the burden. Hence, chances of getting a more robust estimate are better in the present study. Also, Delhi was not a part of the National Mental Health Survey,” he said.
The latest study has shown that most participants were in the habit of frequently eating out, that is consuming food which was not cooked at home (84.9%).
On the cause of stress, the study stated that nearly half (49.1%) the participants reported a stressful event in the past 6 months, citing academic stress (13.4%) or board exams (5.5%). Others reported illness (8.4%) and family-related issues (8.4%) as causes for the stress.
The co-investigators of the study were Dr Harshal Ramesh Salve, Baridalyne Nongkynrih, Rajesh Sagar and Anand Krishnan.
Several other studies have shown that adolescents having depressive tendencies are at a higher risk of developing mental disorders during adulthood.
Symptoms and signs of mental disorders are often minor and slow in progression and mostly remain covert. Often, it gets overlooked during diagnosis by healthcare providers. This not only adds to the burden of mental disorders but also compromises the quality of life.