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Wellness
LifestyleHealth & Wellness

Indian start-ups’ online mental health counselling could help millions who lack access

  • In India, nearly 200 million people have mental health problems and there is fewer than one psychiatrist for every 100,000 people
  • Juno Clinic, a start-up, offers easy and relatively cheap access to online counselling from professionals

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India has an estimated 200 million people living with mental health problems. Most have little or no access to professional help, but an online start-up is working to address this. Photo: Alamy
Bhakti Mathur

The World Health Organisation definition of good health places equal emphasis on mental and social well being as on physical health. Yet stigma surrounds ailments involving the mind.

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Anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and other forms of mental illnesses are increasingly prevalent globally, but often go untreated due to a lack of understanding, and scarcity of qualified therapists.

Nowhere is this more evident than in India where, according to the WHO, out of a population of 1.2 billion, nearly 200 million people suffer from mental disorders. Of these, only 10 to 15 per cent receive treatment, according to India’s National Mental Health Survey 2015-16.

Savvy start-ups are confronting this mismatch – offering patients access to counselling through video and audio sessions. Juno Clinic is one such mental wellness clinic. Founded in January 2016, Juno provides treatment of psychological and psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, OCD and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), among others.

“In India there is a paucity of qualified mental health therapists. There are 9,000 psychiatrists in the entire country, less than one per 100,000 people. Eighty per cent of them work in the biggest five to six cities, leaving 90 per cent of the population with no access to mental health care,” says Anuraag Srivastava, 43, who co-founded Juno Clinic with three other entrepreneurs in January 2016.

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