Opinion | Youth and Mental Health: Building Resilience in an Age of Anxiety

I always say—and I will keep saying—that human resources are the greatest resources. Investment in human beings is the greatest investment a country or region can make. When I say this, I’m talking about the holistic wellbeing of youth and younger minds. We live in a country that eradicated polio, yet many of us still struggle to find our way to a therapist’s office. Better yet, to even speak openly about our mental health with our parents. We may have set foot on the far side of the Moon, but we still look down upon someone who says, “I am depressed.”

While that may not be entirely true anymore, what we are facing is a kind of reductionism. Awareness has certainly increased, but we often laugh it away like a silly joke. Sometimes it feels like a zombie apocalypse—everyone chanting “mental health matters,” but with very few people doing anything tangible to cultivate actual change. Yet youth has always been the catalyst for every revolution, and that is the energy we need to tap into today.

When I was selecting my subjects for Amar Singh College’s NEP Degree, one course in particular fascinated me: Early Childhood Care and Education. Combined with my personal inclinations toward psychology, I arrived at a realisation that has shaped all my views on mental health—everything leads back to childhood.

The youth of Kashmir have grown up in crisis. We were raised by parents who carried their own anxieties and PTSD from crackdowns in every other street, multiple times a month. Their first priority was ensuring we survived—not deciding what conversations they should have with us. Our bodies may have evolved, but our brains still respond to threat like early humans. Even perceived danger sets off the same alarms. So for many of us, anxiety began long before adulthood. And revisiting childhood isn’t about wallowing in self-pity; it is about understanding how not to repeat history. Nobody is perfect—our parents aren’t either—but the only way forward is learning.

To curb rising anxiety among the coming generations, we need to start with ourselves. We need to understand our minds, regulate our nervous systems, and learn what anxiety really is.

What is Anxiety?

Anxiety has many faces—social anxiety, performance anxiety, generalized anxiety, attachment-based anxiety, OCD, and more. And very unfortunately, anxiety is something that must be felt to be healed. There is no magic pill that erases it. Yes, medication can help situationally if prescribed, but the universal truth remains: you have to feel it to heal it.

Anxiety in itself is not the enemy. Like any emotion, it serves a purpose. Without that slight discomfort, there would be no innovation, no progress, no action. What matters is our interaction with it—how we respond, what choices we make, how we navigate it. And by doing it wrong we turn the feeling into a disorder that distresses us and chips away at our time. According to WHO, an estimated 4.4% of adolescents aged 10–14 and 5.5% of those aged 15–19 experience an anxiety disorder.

But today, we live in a world of overstimulation. Social media has radicalized our attention spans, validated our irritability, and fed a self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity. Algorithms reinforce our existing beliefs rather than challenge them. We are overstimulated, disconnected, and emotionally numb. What we desperately need is to put down our phones and pick up actual books—not summaries. Empathy has become a catchphrase rather than a practice. True empathy requires stepping into the mud, not performing it. And for those of us who do feel deeply—often called the “empathic fools”—we give our empathy without boundaries, sometimes to people who do not deserve it leading to anxiety like relationship based anxiety.

Building Resilience

As a start, schools can introduce 10-minute emotional check-ins during morning assemblies (which many of us barely survived without fainting). Being in touch with our emotions doesn’t make us weak; it makes us human. We are not robots with data-loaded brains. Re-humanizing ourselves is the first step toward resilience.

The next step is mass education for parents and elders. They need to understand what anxiety is, why denial is harmful, and how mental health affects the body—gut issues like IBS, acid reflux, hair thinning, derealisation, and more. Ironically, the same physical signs that “sasural waale” love to look for are often rooted in mental distress. And chances are, the person you marry has also experienced anxiety.

The third step is accessibility. Psychotherapy must be made affordable and accessible. The people who need therapy most are often students—economically dependent and juggling fees, studies, and coaching. Like the Golden Card, I appeal to the Government of Jammu & Kashmir to introduce Therapy Cards, issued through psychological assessments, so people who need help can receive it without financial barriers. Let us be the example for the rest of India. Other than this, In Kashmir, there are less than one psychiatrist per 100,000 people, far below global guidelines — showing clearly why youth mental-health support is so weak.

If we educate people from the bottom up, society changes on its own. And if someone says the cost of pursuing this is too high, then mental health simply isn’t a priority to them. But here is the truth: without mental health, there are no people. And without people, every system collapses—just like a dying star imploding into its own gravity.

The writer is an author, columnist, speaker and a mental health advocate pursuing Bachelors at Amar Singh College. Can be contacted at musaibbilal.216061@gmail.com

[Disclaimer: The article has been written by keeping in mind the general readership, this is not meant to replace the professional assessment. If in distress, reach out to the nearest Mental Health Provider]