Care First: Emotional crisis is a universal experience

Doctor, have you tried marijuana?" "No" "Then how do you know it is bad?" Brahmdeep Sindhu, senior psychiatrist at the Civil Hospital in Gurgaon, was stumped when a 14-year-old from a prominent school threw this question at him. "The child then went to great lengths, quoting blogs he had read on the internet, to convince me why he, many of his classmates and some of his juniors, children as young as 12, thought it was harmless, even beneficial, to smoke up." Every month, 15 to 20 new cases of schoolchildren, boys and girls, are brought by their parents to Sindhu for counselling. They are all hooked to cannabis: often marijuana  (the leaf of the plant) and sometimes hashish (extracted from the plant's resin). Far away from Gurgaon, in the fields past Navi Mumbai, children, in school uniform, can occasionally be seen purchasing weed that is grown here, hidden from the authorities by the other crop growing around it. With prices as low as Rs 50 to R...

After nine years of being a heavy Facebook user, Kishore Dhiman suddenly deactivated his account. The 32-year-old Delhi resident says that the long hours spent on the social networking site were beginning to take a toll on his mental health. The absence of human touch on Facebook was slowly gnawing at his state of mind. Though he had many "friends" on the medium and got plenty of "likes" and comments on his posts and pictures, he did not feel any real connection with these people. He was miserable. At 15, Samrat Kohli would spend nearly his entire day on social networking sites, to the extent that he had started retreating from real-life friendships. He had also become unusually violent. The psychologist who counselled him says the boy was exhibiting symptoms of social media related depression. Though social media platforms, like Facebook, have made the world more connected, they have also led to some worrying trends. Loneliness and depression are among thos...