Every time a student dies by suicide in India, our collective institutional response follows the same script. We express profound grief. Then, we swiftly promise to hire more campus counsellors. But counselling alone was never designed to solve a systems problem.
Hiring a handful of therapists on a university campus of 10,000 is the equivalent of placing a single fire extinguisher inside a burning building. If we want to genuinely protect the well-being of our youth, India has to look past ad-hoc emotional support and construct an integrated, resilient mental health infrastructure.
Our current approach to student wellness is fundamentally reactive. We routinely wait for a young person to reach a point of acute crisis before our support mechanisms kick in. This wait-and-see paradigm puts a load on the infrastructure at both ends. It creates immense pressure on a sparse number of campus professionals who are forced to act as primary caretakers and crisis managers at once. Simultaneously, it introduces a severe progression risk, allowing early-stage emotional distress to quietly compound until it escalates into a profound psychiatric emergency that demands far more intensive resources.
A true system recognises that mental health care cannot just be a destination you visit only after everything has broken down. It has to be woven into the fabric of daily campus life.
To build an ecosystem that actually protects our youth, we must move toward a multi-tiered model that mirrors modern health care delivery. Just as physical medicine relies on continuum from early screening to emergency rooms and physical rehabilitation, mental health requires a continuous care stack as well.
Building a healthy culture is the absolute foundation. This means that we must begin to control academic hyper-competition and create conditions where fragility is not stigmatised. From there, we need structured, routine check-ins to identify distress early. Rather than waiting for a student to book a session, data-informed outreach can connect them with mild, moderate, or structured clinical care based on their specific needs. When acute emergencies occur, a campus must have a warm, seamless handoff to clinical psychiatry and emergency medical networks, rather than panic or administrative self-protection. Finally, true systems care for a student after the storm. When a young person returns to campus after taking time off for their mental health, the environment must actively support their transition back into academic and social life.
India has taken massive, highly commendable strides forward over the past year. The Supreme Court’s landmark orders and the creation of the National Task Force (NTF) on Mental Health of Students to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of student welfare facilities in higher education institutions are major leaps in policy.
The next frontier is to operationalise macro policies throughout each state and district. India has to have a uniform, stringent norm for mental health on campus. To successfully operationalise these requirements, institutions need to shift their focus from mere compliance to rigorous systemic accountability. This responsibility must be backed up with the creation of integrated networks that develop formal local agreements with surrounding hospitals, mental clinics and emergency responders to ensure smooth clinical escalation as needed.
The debate around mental health in India is shifting swiftly, led by brave young voices that are asking to be heard. Our response must match the scale of their courage. We must stop treating mental health as an isolated luxury or an afterthought. By treating it as a core infrastructure project which is built on integration, early screening, and psychological safety, we can build a country where our youth do not just survive the pressure, but truly flourish within a system designed to hold them up.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Dr Jothi Neeraja, MD, founder, Maarga Mind Care.
