Kashmir’s Silent Epidemic

The growing number of suicides, addiction, and trauma among Kashmiri youth is not just a public-health statistic, it is a crisis that cries for the government’s and the civil society’s attention. Ata Srinagar conference on Monday, psychiatrist Mushtaq Margoob, who has spent three decades listening to the valley's pain, reminded his audience that trauma does not go away easily. It deeply affects young minds, leading them toward depression, delinquency, and post-traumatic stress.

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The numbers alone are chilling. A Médecins Sans Frontiéres survey found that one in five Kashmiris suffers from a psychiatric disorder. Suicide rates, once negligible, have climbed from half a case per 100,000 before the 1990s to 13 by 2020. By 2022, 600 people took their own lives across Jammu and Kashmir, 375 in the valley alone, with experts admitting that many cases go unreported. However, behind each figure is a story, a household left in perpetual grief and in many cases deprived of a lone breadwinner.