Women are more vulnerable to mental health problems while employed in a job than men. Due to multiple reasons during a pandemic woman are more vulnerable. The access to healthcare for mental health problems has been an even bigger problem for women. Much research conducted during the pandemic concluded with more stress, fear, anxiety, and worry for women due to economic inequalities, the unequal division of labor, job insecurity, and many more. Mostly women work in the informal sector in India and job security is lost during the pandemic, adding to the problem is a massive impact of household work, lack of government schemes for necessities, and being in a violent unhappy environment while in a pandemic.
The loss of independence, lack of safe space, and economic instability adds up to social and economic insecurity, the pandemic and availability of free time and lack of escape from work also leads to emotional vulnerability and overthinking about trauma. Mental healthcare is expensive, and, in a pandemic, mental healthcare becomes a necessity, but many women are put in a situation to choose necessities of food and shelter over mental healthcare. Working women are also faced with gender-based discrimination and the wage gap, these facts add up to the problem of economic and opportunity inequality during a pandemic.
Even though a different section of women faced different sets of problems’, while some working women faced more economic insecurity, some lived in physical and psychologically violent households and many others while working for a job. None of these problems can be compared but it still does not deny the fact that women are more prone to mental health problems. Pregnant women are even more vulnerable during the pandemic due to social distancing and more precautions, but maternal mental health is another factor that makes women more exposed to mental health problems. In India, women lack basic sexual healthcare or mental healthcare in a normal world too, the presence of a pandemic multiplied the impact and made millions anxious.
Many organizations and individual professionals came forward to help people with mental health issues during the pandemic for free but the impact on women and minority communities is very high. Mental healthcare unavailability varies from place, class, caste, and gender. Solution for this issue this need a deeper understanding of the issue as the problem is deep and diverse for different sections of society. A major reason for mental healthcare unavailability as because the major focus of governments and healthcare was shifted to COVID-19 and limiting the spread along with the treatment of mental health as a taboo.
Sharing my personal experience, in the last 6 months 5 people contacted me toenquire about therapists, all of them being women of varying age groups. 4 out of 5 of these women were working and explained their pressure and increased anxiety of life the reason for the contact during a pandemic. For the first time, my mother went for therapy due to increasing anxiety and the need for mental healthcare. Therapy gave her a new perspective about her problems and helped her perceive mental health as an important part of lifestyle. Going to a therapy also helped my mother change her perspective about mental health and she encouraged a lot her friends to seek professional help for mental health and treat it as any other disease.During the pandemic, news of late actor Sushant Singh Rajput's suicide has increased the discussion on mental health, it has not exposed the inaccessibility and unaffordability of mental healthcare for women and minority communities. There is a need for more preparation and policymaking focused on mental health.