I was searching for stats on mental disorders in Pakistan and I came across some interesting etiology. The conclusions are from various studies done from 1999. I didn’t want to ruin the thread on OCD in Pakistan so I’m posting the excerpt here:
This is pretty obvious, those suffering losses and constant anxiety brought on by abuse, family problems, economic problems etc will obviously suffer bouts of depression but do these develop into more serious long term problems requiring treatment like clinical depression and OCD and phobias? The article talks about mental distress but mental distress in stressful situations like “low family income, marital disputes, too many children, and verbal abuse by in-laws” is expected but when does this mental distress becoming something detrimental?
The studies covered in this article were conducted in Sindh and Punjab. I wonder what kind of prevalence we would find if the studies were more widespread.
Kinda scary. I know three people living in Pakisatn with mental disorders, two with schizophrenia and a mamoo who was apparently delusional (so people say). One of the people with schizophrenia was a woman. She never got any medical help, people just think of “pagalpan” as being incurable. They used to lock her up. At one point near her death she couldn’t move around much and would urinate where she was sitting. Such jahaliat.
Most people in Pak think it is 'jaadu' or some 'jin' that has come over the person and rather use 'taweez' to cure the person. It is very common that these mental illnesses never are diagnosed or treated.
The metastudy (in the link above) concludes there's a prevalence of 34% but it groups everything under the umbrella of depressive and anxiety disorders and there's no distinction between serious and non-serious and how these disorders are classified so that rate is pretty untrustworthy. Can you believe that up until the time of this study, there has been no nation-wide survey (I think)???