Kashmir's Silent Epidemic

The growing number of suicides, addiction, and trauma among Kashmiri youth is not just a public-health statistic, it is a crisis that cries for the government's and the civil society's attention. At a Srinagar conference on Monday, psychiatrist Mushtaq Margoob, who has spent three decades listening to the valley's pain, reminded his audience that trauma does not go away easily. It deeply affects young minds, leading them toward depression, delinquency, and post-traumatic stress.

The numbers alone are chilling. A Médecins Sans Frontières survey found that one in five Kashmiris suffers from a psychiatric disorder. Suicide rates, once negligible, have climbed from half a case per 100,000 before the 1990s to 13 by 2020. By 2022, 600 people took their own lives across Jammu and Kashmir, 375 in the valley alone, with experts admitting that many cases go unreported. However, behind each figure is a story, a household left in perpetual grief and in many cases deprived of a lone breadwinner.

From Chennai, psychiatrist Lakshmi Vijayakumar offered a sobering national context: India recorded 170,000 suicides in 2022, surpassing China.“Suicide is not instinct,” she said.“It is learned. And what is learned can be unlearned if the signals are seen in time.” As she rightly pointed out, this epidemic is preventable if society develops the will and the systems to act early.

What Kashmir faces today is not merely a medical problem of serotonin or dopamine. It is the human cost of prolonged turmoil, where nearly half of the valley's children have witnessed violence firsthand, and nine out of ten adults live with suppressed anger and anxiety. As a result, many have taken to addiction, as the rising numbers of drug abuse in the Valley over the past decade would have us believe.

On a positive note, youth are showing resilience spoke of children healing through poetry, theatre, prayer, and family. What is required now is not just more psychiatrists, but an entire ecosystem of care: school counselors trained to read distress signals, community programs that make mental health as routine as physical check-ups, and de-stigmatisation campaigns to bring this crisis out of the shadows. Policymakers must fund treatment and prevention with the urgency they reserve for disease outbreaks.

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