Substance use disorder can lead to short- and long-term negative health effects. These can be physical and mental, ranging from moderate to severe. They will depend on the substance a person had been using.
It is well known that within every man there is a contradiction between his conscience and instinctive desires. While animals are servile to their instinct, human beings have a command of their conscience over the instinctive desires.
The definite indication of social crisis is the sharply increasing trend of consuming heroine and suicide and variety other mental disease and derangements among the younger generations. Particularly the suicidal tendency is sharply on increase among the students and young youths.
Government College of Education in collaboration with Kashmir American Society for Healthcare, Medical Education and Research, Kashmir organised a day long workshop at College of Education Srinagar.
The workshop sought to empower the youth stakeholders like teachers with the knowledge and ability to help them in early identification, and providing appropriate interventions for psychoactive substance use among students and youths in the community.
The problem of consuming heroine and committing suicide has become a crucial issue but there are mo matching attempts to understand and redress the problem. We see that scores of youths committing suicide belong to upper middle class families.
The education is assuming the character of investment; more mental pressure is created on students to be successful and able enough to guarantee the return.
The social isolation and unbelievable mental stress, as a result of ruthless competition in this crisis ridden system, are also the reasons for the rise in consuming heroine and suicidal tendencies among young people.
They tend to carry their own burdens alone without anyone around to share, and get moral and emotional support from. This leads to an oversensitive mental condition, which sometimes leads to attempted and actual cases of consuming heroine.
Dr. Nahida Nazir says that stress, peer pressure, anxiety regarding performance, and socio-economic inequalities are some of the important issues that affect youth and play a significant role in substance use initiation. A series of workshops on the similar issue must be conducted with the Imams, and community leaders.
There are issues which drive people to substance use. During Covid, we witnessed loneliness was a problem and often many encountered the feeling of dejection and the feeling of life not worth living. These resulted in substance use and then there is a set of people who are addicted to substances for pleasure.
Addiction to gadgets is also destroying the lives of children. The internet mobile culture is promoting a virtual community, where time spent playing with local friends is replaced by internet gaming with virtual playmates, and face-to-face communication and meaningful personal relationships are replaced by virtual friendship through social networks.
Youth and children are living in the virtual world, isolated from reality, with only gadgets giving them company. Too much addiction to internet results in an isolated life. In this age of social networking and websites youth are isolated in their societies and live a reclusive life.
Many guardians don’t allow their wards to study books or encourage any informal reading, fearing that this would divert their attention from concentrating on their career.
The lack of acquaintance with the lives of great men who could have been their role models in life, lack of association, friendship and emotional relations within family and society and constant exposure to unbearable stress generated due to rat-race for success, all these are sharply increasing and desperation , rudeness, arrogance and ruthlessness among the younger generations.
The author is Research student at IASE and RTI and Environment Activist.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author.
The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK.