86: Spotlight: Mental Health, the hidden crisis amongst Indian students: A conversation with Dr Dr Lata Dhir Prof of Organisational Behaviour & Leadership SPJIMR

The Elephant in the Room

WARNING: THE INFORMATION BELOW MAY BE TRIGGERING

1.64 lakhs, a daily average of 450 or 18 per hour…..

That is the number of deaths due to suicides in India in 2021

The statistics for death by suicide amongst young people is worse. Not surprising then that this is the third leading cause of death amongst young adults and a significant problem amongst college students in India.

Mental health can bye impacted due to a myriad of factor amongst young people. The two big issues that stand out are a) Stigma around mental health, it is a taboo subject that individuals and families are reluctant to engage with. 2) An education system that is not knowledge oriented but exam focused - testing students on their ability to ace the system.

In a post independence India there has been a rise in social capital attached to educational attainment (because it leads to acceptable jobs, financial and material gains). Indian students face some of the toughest competitive examinations in the world. And just to share an example - with less than 1% acceptance rate the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) exam is said to be tougher than getting in Harvard. A million students, yes that is right 1 MILLION students apply for the 13000 seats.

The pandemic of course has exacerbated the issue. Peer pressure, all consuming access to media, parental pressure, fear of failure, lack of access to opportunities all compound the issue. With prominent Bollywood celebrities and more young people speaking about the issue - there has been some progress. But, by and large the issue remains a taboo and largely undiagnosed.

In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with Dr Lata Dhir Prof of Organisational Behaviour & Leadership and Group Head of Design Thinking at SPJIMR about the deep challenges we face in addressing this hidden crisis. Lata is deeply passionate about helping create the structures and safe spaces to support young people and proactively address mental health issues. She believes this is her life’s mission - her why?

If you would like to learn more, listen here

Memorable Passages from the podcast

👉🏾 Good morning. I'm excited to be a part of this whole journey. How are you doing?

👉🏾 Who am I? Okay, I am a professor of Organisational behaviour and Leadership, at SPJIMR, one of the top schools in India. That’s my formal introduction. And I'm a psychologist. But my major, major passion lies in mental health. And that's something that I'm really passionate about and that's maybe the ‘why’ for most of the work that I do.

👉🏾 It's a plethora of things, right? Generally, when you think of saying that you're a professor, in a traditional institute or a college, you are mainly teaching, right? Teaching, of course, is a core, but there's a lot of research that we need to work on, on the work that we present in classrooms, case studies that we write, articles that we need to publish. That's one part of the whole process. We do a lot of management development programs for organisations. The academia industry kind of connections and meet up, become extremely important if you need to really solve real-life problems in the world. So that's where we collaborated a lot with industries, sectors across India. We do consulting work with them. Sometimes we write a book also .

👉🏾Thank you. A very, very interesting person and a very interesting organisation as you know. It’s a completely Indian-based genesis in the HDFC group of organisations. And on Mr. H T Parekh and Deepak Parekh, who are the pioneers of this financial sector. I've added some more things in my plethora of work which is Vishwas, creating psychologically safe spaces and counselling sessions.

👉🏾 I do a lot of personal growth labs and leadership labs, I think that would be my forte if you had to say. Maybe I'll take a minute to kind of tell you the difference, we do workshops, we do classes, we do labs. So when we do sessions on say leadership for example, we are just giving you the knowing piece of knowledge, of theories et cetera.

👉🏾 The moment we get your workshop, we talk about some kind skills, communication, negotiation, team building, et cetera. But the moment we talk about a lab, we are actually impacting the being, maybe give them a place and a space where they can experiment with their thoughts and feelings. And that's the space that I really like to work on.

👉🏾 Like all children who will do well in their studies in India, we either become a doctor or an engineer. So I was going to be a doctor. Very soon realised that doctor was not something that I wanted to be. I was not really interested. So I had you know, forward-looking parents who kind of said, Ok, then drop out and I dropped out from medicine and finally got into psychology, right? And psychology was not something that was happening decades back. Right. It was a lot of stigma, but I did get into psychology. So that maybe was the genesis, the connecting of the dots of my why today. I went onto psychology without knowing why I was doing psychology. And I completed my graduation, my masters. Did an MBA in HR just to make my parents feel a better about themselves, okay, their daughter has an MBA and then of course I did my MPhil and PhD in psychology.

👉🏾 But when I came into a B school mental health psychology was not something that people really talked about, like a decade and a half back. People were generally talking about quantitative toolkits like finance, marketing, et cetera. And I wanted to bring in psychology, but the moment I would go to the corporate world and say I'm a psychologist, people say, Wow, No!

👉🏾 And that's when I said I'm a behavioural scientist, right? It sounds more fancy.

👉🏾 More acceptable, yeah. But I kind of felt psychology was important because at the heart of everything that we do, is understanding human behaviour. And that is when I started focusing on labs, I started focusing on understanding the psychological mechanisms of what the aspirations, the goals, thoughts and feelings of human beings are.

👉🏾 As we say, we have no idea about our emotions at all. We do not know. We know the world, we know the moon, but we do not know, our own emotions, right? And we do not understand our own thoughts. So that's where I started kind of focusing a lot on that. And I started conducting these labs, and that is when students would keep coming back to me. After the lab and say, like we'll not just talk for ourselves because suddenly the pandoras box is opened and they started thinking about themselves, reflecting about their behaviour and their thoughts and feelings and they would just keep coming back to me. I had this one student who came to me, so came back Sudha and that's kind of left me an impact is when he walked into my cabin and says, "You know, ma'am, I go into other professors' room to understand marketing and finance and getting a job, but when I walk into your room, I feel that I'm going to get answers to my life".

👉🏾 And he said it in Hindi, which is Vishwas hai mujhe (I trust) And Vishwas in English means trust. I trust that I'll get my answers. I have that Vishwas that something, you know, good will happen, that we know. That kind of hit me and I started realising that there were a lot of people coming, a lot of students coming to me, looking for that agenda less conversations, which then led to more crucial conversations in my cabin, and they're talking about themselves. But those crucial conversations needed that safe space where they could happen, right?

👉🏾 So I started thinking a little more deeper and I said, here is this space maybe I have created not knowingly, but it is happening. Okay, there must be something that I'm doing, so there's an art to it, but there's a science to it. So I started kind of delving deep into the science of creating those psychologically safe spaces. And I also realised that there are, these people who are coming to me. What if there are others out there who do not have an access and don't even know that they can go to somebody, right? Cause the moment Sudha, we talk about mental health, we talk about mental illness, we talk about anxiety and depression. And we know that there are places we can go to, but we may not go because of stigma. And that is when I kind of thought that we could create this space and I started reaching out to students and then formalised an entire process and we launched Vishwas in September 2015. And that is a time when UN, in the sustainable development goals, added mental health. I got to know later, but it was like some god's connection building up, but that's what we did. So I think we are latching onto a higher goal on the sustainable development goal, number three, which is mental health.

And I think that's when I started getting more and more involved, more and more deeper and the ‘why’ of what I'm doing in my life

👉🏾 Yeah, you're right Sudha. It's a huge responsibility because when somebody opens out their heart to you, you know, you need to honour their being. And building the trust is like a verb, right? Like I always say my students like, love is a verb, it's not a noun. In the same way, trust is a verb, you need to build it up. You need to show your own vulnerabilities and if you need to share something about yourself, for them to be able to kind of get into that space where they can then form their trusting relationship.

👉🏾 Yeah, so being a psychologist, let me go back to talking about a psychologist, Carl Rogers, He talks about unconditional positive regard. His therapy starts with saying that I give you the unconditional positive regard. And it's a humanistic psychology movement, which says that I accept you for who you are, I lay no conditions.

👉🏾 And that is what is not happening. We have so many conditions that we put on our people whether it's parents or teachers or society, so many, many conditions. I will respect you, I will love you only if you meet those conditions. We starting on the wrong track, number one. In our society, we have expectations, we have conditions, we want to change every individual because we believe sitting in some high society as parents or teachers or as whoever we want, in authority figures, telling ourselves that we know how the world should run, and we have made certain rules and you need to follow those rules.

Who says?

👉🏾 I think we start with the wrong kind of an assumption saying that we know what's best. And Sudha you know for sure that covid turned the world upside down and it told you that whatever assumptions you were thinking is not actually going to happen. The way you thought the work would happen is not happening

👉🏾 And two years down the line, have we learnt our lesson?

👉🏾 Not at all.

👉🏾 Because you want the world to go back to where it started and everybody say, "Oh, let's go back to the normal". What is normal? And I'm sorry if I'm digressing, but the question that, you know, really comes to my mind is, the world will not be able to go back, because history demands that you go forward. We can learn our lessons from what's happened, but we need to move forward.

👉🏾 But we are not.

👉🏾 Again, we are stuck in the same rat race, that herd mentality, the expectations, judging people based on their success on how much do you earn. And so we create that kind of pressure on our kids as parents. And we want them to live up to those particular expectations. I've already put some conditions and I'm already wanting to change you from who you are. Interestingly, let's look at nature, lot to learn from nature. We don't tell a rose plant to grow like a Daffodil.

👉🏾 We don't do that. Then why are we doing it to human beings? And so we are doing it to satisfy our own, call it ego. There is so much of mental health issues that we see around ourselves. If don't look at only anxiety, depression, suicide. We look at loneliness, we look at FOMO, we look at cognitive dissonance, we look at fear of failure, we look at how to manage our disappointments. These are across the spectrum of human race. And how many of us, if we had to question ourselves, how many of us our actually thriving in our lives?

👉🏾 Yeah. It'll not happen without a mindset change.

👉🏾 So I kind of heard somebody saying failure or success is just a feedback. It is no reflection about who you are as a person. That's extremely important, because failure is something that's happening outside me. And it's happening and I need to respond to it. And then I go back to another very famous psychiatrist I'm very, very fond of there's a book ‘Man's search for Meaning’ by Viktor Frankel. It's a very interesting book to read.

👉🏾 And he talks about when he was in the concentration camp and he was fighting so many issues, wasn't sure whether he'd be alive, but he kind of told himself that between the stimulus and the response lies the space. And in that space lies my freedom to choose. So failures are inevitable, they will happen.

👉🏾 But how do I respond to that failure is a choice that I have to make and that's something that we have to do. So while we can say that the society is not accepting our failures, and I'm trying to kind of bring in another concept here, which is Steven Covy's concept about circle of concern and circle influence.

👉🏾 So I'm concerned about what the world is doing, I'm concerned about, the society and expectations and parents and teachers. We wanna enable our youth to be able to get the power to decide what they can influence and that is what they can control.

👉🏾 And the control lies in that space where I decide what I will do with my failure. If I look at failure as a reflection of who I am, a reflection of my own, my self-esteem is gonna go down. And I'm gonna keep on ruminating about that whole stuff. But on the other hand, if in that space I decided that's a failure, it's just a feedback. I am going to reflect and find out cognitively what went wrong, why did I fail? What could I have done wrong? Have those conversations with myself and with other people who understand me. I will be able to accept failure because failures, like, you know, there's a very old saying which says, failures are stepping stones to success.

👉🏾 I have to fail right? There is no way that I'm not fail. But in India or this side of the world where there are so many people, right? Opportunities are less. And getting into that prime college, prime job you have to fight, like somebody said, very interestingly, getting into a top B school in India is tougher than getting into, say, a Harvard or Stanford, because of the ratio.

So I think it's something that as a culture, we need to, first of all understand failure is fine. Talk about the fact we should have conversations around failure.

👉🏾 I wrote this book on HDFC and Deepak Parekh and H T Parekh. There were struggles, there were failures, there's conflicts that happened. And that is a journey that we need to kind of celebrate too. When we talk we about our role models, we only talk about somebody who's reached the top, but what about the struggles?

👉🏾 So I'll, go forward and come backward to your answer. You're saying they should not be left behind. So those who are not left behind and they've reached the top, whether it's top B schools or it's a corporate world, many of them are burnt out even before they reach 40.

👉🏾 Many of them fight mental health issues even before they reach certain level. There is no happiness. There is no joy in what they're doing. They find no meaning in the work that they're doing. After some time they don't know what they're doing with their jobs. They don't have the courage to leave it because they're now in golden handcuffs. Okay, you will reach there and then what? I will end up into a mental wreck. And there's another book by Clayton Christensen on ‘How to Measure Your Life’. A very well-established professor at Harvard. And he says, how will you have fulfilling relationships, how will you have fulfilling careers and how will you stay on change? When you get great power come with great responsibility.

👉🏾 Are we teaching them that? We're not. We just saying, just succeed. By all means, reach the top. By all means, get the money, get the big car and a big house. And you know, you can show off to the world and I as parents and teacher and say, Oh, that child is mine. Wow! And look at the pressure that person is going through, it's crazy. So is the education system to be blamed? A hundred percent. Because, look at the marks that we give student, it's out in the open, everybody knows I've got an 80-90% and the other person's got a 50%. What a super way of putting on somebody's self-esteem. And the guy with a 90% believes that, Oh wow, I'm God's gift to mankind now.

👉🏾 And that person comes into a B school or a top institute in the world, and now sudden realises that there are others who are as good with the 90% as he or she is. And now I don't know how to manage that failure, that disappointment.

👉🏾 So right from the beginning, right when we are in school and college, we are teaching our kids to be competitive. And telling our kids that there's this one best way of answering a question. And sorry, Sudha, but I'm gonna take you to three lessons that we learned in school, which we need to throw in the dustbin.

Number one; teacher is always right. Teachers not always right, the manager, the boss authority figure is always not right. They're too many perspectives to one thing.

Second, the reason I hated maths when I was growing up, was, there is only one best method of answering the question. If I don't follow the steps, I `will get less marks even if I get the right answer.

And the third is that it is only through my own efforts will I reach success. And life teaches you, it's not about independence, it's for interdependence.

Where is that coming from? I haven't taught them any of those skills.