Could lemon juice help bust mental stress?
While it may not be backed by any scientific reasoning, lemon juice turned out to be one of the preferred ways to fight mental stress for a person who shared his experience through the District Child Protection Unit’s (DCPU) #sharemystress campaign, coinciding with World Mental Health Day on Saturday.
The campaign, under which the DCPU invited short one-minute videos on simple techniques to deal with mental stress, has thrown up several such interesting methods. Though drinking water, travelling, reading and doing yoga emerged among the numerous methods to fight mental stress, the most common outlet turned out to be sharing it with a close confidante.
“We came up with such a campaign since we could not organise events as we usually do to observe World Mental Health Day. The videos will be posted on the official Facebook page of DCPU,” said M.K.P. Hafzeena, project officer for non-institutional care, DCPU. The organisation may even explore the possibility of bringing out a compilation of selected videos.
The DCPU has been offering emotional succour through counselling ever since the outbreak of the pandemic and, going by the feedback, children are getting used to the changed world with online classes and being confined indoors.
Psychiatrist C.J. John said being restricted indoors posed emotional, mental and intellectual hurdles in the growth of children. “At the moment, we are only addressing the intellectual issues through online classes while the emotional and mental challenges go unaddressed,” he said.
Dr. John said that in a world ravaged by the pandemic, people needed to acquire “psychological first aid” skills to empower the community to identify those in mental distress, listen to them and enable them to access help. He said it would be in tune with the year’s World Mental Health Day observation that calls for ‘Mental Health for All - Greater Investment - Greater Access’.
“Unlike at the start of the pandemic, psychological stress emanating from secondary reasons triggered by the disease such as economic distress, job loss and confinement of children indoors is increasingly coming to the fore,” he said.
