This is the time for examination and results! Students are being treated like container cartons and luggage suitcases wherein we normally dump in as much as possible before we embark on a trip for business or pleasure. The parents and the schools vie with one another to impose all their will and wish-list on their children without even an iota about their capability, mindset, wishes and dreams. They are not even treated better than an inanimate washing machine wherein you dump all dirty clothes and allow it to run for some time to come clean at the end. All children at schools are not alike and God has deliberately created them differently for varied reasons. Everyone has his own aspirations and ambitions. But parents mostly crush them in the bud and create an artificial and tutored replica of themselves without much ado. Then what happens? The children are bound to rebel in some cases which in fact is better than the ones who swallow it and slowly and steadily dip into depression. They become mad and lose focus in their life and become disinterested in anything in life. Depression is a slow, steady and sure disaster capable of annihilation sooner than later. It evolves initially as a mood disorder, traceable to the brain’s incapability to react or respond to the inner and outer stress and eventually affects the whole body and the mind and leads to dysfunction and malfunctioning. It deprives the body of its rhythms and totally cripples the orderly functioning. Memory loss, shouting, crying, sleeplessness, emitting hatred on everyone, lack of appetite et al are the outcome and symptoms of depression. Those in depression many a time avoid others in the meeting, in the family and in offices and impose forced solitude on themselves. They show the least interest in talking to others nor do they try to understand what others talk about them. The brain reduces to the level of utter inertness often in them.

There could be a short-term depression on account of a huge of wealth or people which may sometimes remain with the person and fade away by constant and conscious introspection and self- direction. The students are more vulnerable and they commit suicide on a small trigger like not passing in an examination or parent/teachers’ chiding. This happens mostly at the teenage levels and the parents and Teachers have a greater role and responsibility to monitor the behaviour of the children in times of such impending crisis and redeem them with soothing words and encouragement rather than indulging in dangerous accusations and abuses. Suicidal death can seldom be a solution to any problem on this earth. Self-pity and low self-esteem play a diabolic role in suicides. Anxieties and worries build in the mind, uncertainty, insecurity, fear of failure- all accumulate over a period of time and burst one day leading to such monstrous proportions of self-destruction and annihilation.

It is here that the students need constant verve and protection from the vagaries of the ill-thoughts. Parents wrongly believe to their dismay that whatever children demand are supplied their job is over whereas it is not so. Expecting the children to excel in IQ with insurmountable stress and strain will lead them nowhere; instead, the family members and the Teachers have an onerous task of equipping them with stress-busting games and drills and eventually prepare them to face challenges of ups and downs in life. In short, make them emotionally competent to withstand the evils of stress and keep them personal morale high! Then success follows!