What is the scope for counseling psychology in India?

In response to my article The teen years the students at the college ended up developing a keen  interest in pursuing psychology as a field! They had many questions regarding the field. There were 6 questions in total, and the answers i gave them are published in the following series. I kept it simple so that it could be understood by the 15-22 year olds’ there.

These are but my humble opinions from my experience in the last 10 years. the first question was-

What is the scope for counseling psychology in India?

To answer this question, I want to first explain a few concepts- objectivity and subjectivity; ‘need’ and ‘felt need’

Objective is a statement that is completely unbiased. It is not touched by the speaker’s previous experiences or tastes. It is verifiable by looking up facts or performing studies. Subjective is a statement that has been colored by the character of the speaker or writer. It often has a basis in reality, but reflects the perspective through with the speaker views reality. It cannot be verified using concrete facts and figures.

A need is simply an objective requirement that a unit has (the unit can be a machine, a person, family or community at large)

Felt need is more subjective in nature and depends a lot on one’s motivation, awareness, surroundings etc.  Felt needs are changes deemed necessary by people to correct the deficiencies they perceive in their community.

Let me make this easier with an example- Lets consider there is this village with a population of 100, of which 50 are children. What do you think are the needs of this village- quite logically, food, electricity and water supply, good housing facilities, good schools etc.

But despite the fact that you think these are the needs, the villagers might not feel the same about it. All they want might probably be food and shelter. They may not prioritize education as a need per say.

This simply means that they don’t have a felt need for education, but they have a felt need for food and housing.

The situation is similar to the above mentioned when it comes to this career. In a country like India there is a dearth of mental health professionals like counselors, and clinical psychologists. There is a rising epidemic of mental health problems, and disorders. So there is indeed a need. The scope for counselors/ counseling psychologists are in schools, work places, mediating family problems, stress management, mental health units. The scopes for clinical psychologists are in private practice and hospitals. There is always the added scope of research and/or teaching in some college/university. Both may also work in NGOs’, government projects, programs to aid community mental health and in building awareness amongst the general public.  Currently the scope is better abroad than in our country, but the trend is slowly changing. According to recent studies, mental health disorders account for nearly a sixth of all health-related disorders. Yet we have just 0.4 psychiatrists and 0.02 psychologists per 100,000 people, and 0.25 mental health beds per 10,000 populations.

But the felt need is not on par with the actual statistics. This is predominantly because of stigma. Stigma is when a lack of awareness, leads to misinterpretations, in this case wrt mental health. People still think mental health problems are because one may be weak, a poor personality or due to bad luck, a curse etc. and everyone knows how the society avoids these people and topics. Due to fear, people often keep their problems a secret, and unfortunately this is contra indicative, which means, it only worsens the problem. But things are changing; people are getting more and more aware as the days pass, so hopefully the felt need increases and people enjoy these services.

Secondly there are poor legislations with regard to the Indian government. In developed countries, you need a license to offer psychology courses and finally to practice. However, there aren’t any hard and fast rules in India. Due to the same, 2 things happen. First of all the laymen/regular people do not know who to consult when they have a problem.   Secondly, there are many people who do a short term, long distance course in some psychology paper, and they end up starting their own practice. Owing to their lack of proper training and experience, they end up doing a poor job, (health problems increase than decrease) thus propagating the idea that this field is a sham (useless).  This ensures that the felt need never increases, rather decreases.

There are 5 key barriers to increasing mental health services availability: the absence of mental health from the public health agenda and the implications for funding; the current organization of mental health services; lack of integration within primary care; inadequate human resources for mental health; and lack of public mental health leadership. Thus there is a lot of scope for work indeed, but it isn’t frankly going to be easy. If any of you needs to partake in these issues, I ensure my support.