Hyderabad, May 29 -- Mental health remains a deeply neglected dimension of India's prison system-a system already under pressure from overcrowding, poor infrastructure, and chronic understaffing. While conversations around mental well-being have slowly gained traction in public health and policy discourse, the psychological needs of incarcerated individuals are routinely overlooked. The situation in Indian prisons is nothing short of a silent emergency, where thousands of inmates suffer in isolation without access to the most basic mental health services.

According to an important synthesis of research by Raghavan and Rabiya (2018), titled Prison Mental Health in India: Review, psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, adj...