A report by the World Health Organization cited that 41.9 per cent of women experience depressive disorders and disability from neuropsychiatric diseases compared to 29.3 per cent in men. The most discouraging report was that the lifetime prevalence rate of violence against women ranges from 16 per cent to 50 per cent. For every death by suicide in India, 200 other people are battling suicidal ideation.
An eye-opening report by the United Nations mentions that around two-thirds of married women in India are victims of domestic violence. The practice results in a woman losing seven working days in the country. Furthermore, 70 per cent of women falling in the age bracket of 15 to 49 years are victims of regular beating, rape, and coerced sex. Women experience public humiliation, sexual trafficking, mental and physical torture, and female foeticide. A woman's reproductive roles like childbearing, infertility, failure to deliver a male child ultimately lead to wife-battering and female suicide.
Over 20 years WIN has rescued, rehabilitated, and repatriated women abandoned on the streets through mental illness. Such women are invisible to the thousands of passers by and are subjected to unimaginable abuse.
WIN’s mission is to prevent as many women as possible from suffering the same fate through our Mental Health Awareness Programmes. Addressing ignorance and superstitions surrounding mental illness is a large undertaking but we are doing it one community at a time.