Mental Health Education: A Pathway for Entrepreneurial Readiness

Introduction

The word Education has its roots buried deep in the dead language of Latin. It comes from the Latin word 'Educare,' meaning - to rear or bring up. Since the world's inception in the 16th century, over the past 600 years, the word has seen many interpretations according to the various situations and circumstances it has been used in. In the relatively immediate past, majorly in the 20th century, education addressed almost everything but the domain of mental health. Statistics show that about 12-13% of school students in India suffer from mental, emotional, and communicative problems. Fifty million children in India had mental health issues with no support howsoever. These statistics and the numbers they bring into the picture are often downplayed and not treated with adequate seriousness, leading to catastrophic consequences.

Nevertheless, that is not the case now. These numbers have brought about a change in the way people perceive mental well-being. Humans are now more cautious about the same. It has proved to change the education being imparted around us as we breathe. This word might not have seen a more significant change in its entire history than it has started to see in the 21st century.

Education is no longer seen as the exclusive means of imparting predefined skills to students. Now the range and scope being considered are beyond just academic and physical education. In the twenty-first century, our educational system has started emphasizing mental health education more. This has ensured overall development in numerous ways. Mentally healthy individuals are more excited to learn new things, actively participate in various extracurricular activities, have excellent interpersonal relationship skills with adults and people younger than them, and display enhanced problem-solving and risk-taking. Decision-making skills, have non-aggressive and composed behavioral patterns, and always add positivity wherever and whenever they interact.

Yet, it has never been more significant than in the face of terrible socioeconomic situations such as Covid-19. The pandemic has resulted in changes hitherto undreamt of. The anxiety, grief, and depression have taken a toll on almost all individuals, leading to various scary outcomes like crying and disruptive behavior in younger kids, and increased probabilities of violence and bullying tendencies in older individuals. Hence, mental health education is the need of the hour.

However, imparting mental health education does not just serve to overcome the various issues in our society but also contributes to many essential realms that are often not so visible to the naked eye and often looked past. One of those realms is among the most sought-after fields, i.e., entrepreneurship. In the simplest way possible, entrepreneurship is the process of setting up a business to make a profit.

Entrepreneurship, in the language engineers, love to describe, is directly proportional to communal economic growth. The more the number of entrepreneurs in a system, the better the economy and welfare of it. But apart from this direct proportionality, entrepreneurial readiness is another element worth looking at. In layperson's terms, entrepreneurial enthusiasm refers to an individual's mental state related to the entrepreneurship domain. The main factor influencing the mentioned readiness is an individual's ability to appropriately use his entrepreneurial potential, explore the available opportunities and use all the resources at hand.

The definition itself tells us it is no surprise that entrepreneurship is one of the most mentally demanding fields. Uncertainty, responsibility, balance, and loneliness are some of the critical aspects of an entrepreneur's voyage and are all extremely exhaustive as far as the mental game is concerned. Hence, enlightening individuals who are related to the field of entrepreneurship with the correct form of mental health education could go on to give them a healthy edge over their peers.