At global youth conferences like the UN and MUN, where ideas shape futures, one conversation remains strangely missing: teen emotions.
Why are we told to stay quiet and break down in silence?
Why must we whisper what we feel, as if teenagers’ emotions are too loud for the world to bear?
“Oh, a teenager will now guide us on policy-making?”
That’s the sour undertone of a system that still believes only those in suits can think smart.
But here’s the truth: we feel, we question, and we see.
And sometimes, the ones hurting the most are the ones who understand the cracks in the system.
The Quiet Storm Inside Us
We are taught to carry a trait, but not a soul. When scores begin to cost students their lives and silent anger turns into trauma, we need to understand this: “The bill of the soul’s misery can’t be paid with money or power, not even by fulfilling desires that were once dreams.”
If the UN and MUN are committed to solving the world’s deepest problems, then why is emotional struggle, especially among youth, still missing from the conversation?
Dreams are often seen as the soul’s victory when achieved, but when they go unnoticed, they become a quiet torment we carry for a lifetime. As the generation is evolving day by day, the emotional struggles are growing and leading students to take their lives.
India today stands on the edge of a brutal race, where the fight is not about knowledge or grades but between lakhs of students fighting just for one seat, which marks the fall of a student’s career. And the irony? Our emotions continue to boil over, while the system looks the other way.
According to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, this policy emphasises the development of rational thinking, compassion, empathy, and ethical values in students, highlighting the importance of emotional development.
But why are youth taking their lives? Why does a headline pop up, making youth feel numb every day? Why are they in a quest to find peace over happiness? Why are they questioning themselves every day about whether they’ll get into what they want? Why getting an education in this country feels like a burden when it comes to entrance exams, where scores won’t let you into your dream college or university. Why are they seeking to go abroad rather than staying back in India? If this continues, then how do we grow as a country whose youth are choosing other countries over their own?
And above all, this creates peer pressure, which suddenly engrosses the youth into mental health issues, leading to depression and stress.
Mental Health Is a Global Matter, Not a Private One
I, as a youth of India, stand strong and call out for action to quit anxiety, depression, and trauma from the lives of youth. When a youth suffers, it’s not just personal—it’s political. It forces the world to question diplomats and very people in suits who claim to speak for us.
I may not be the right person to speak up for this, but I can assure you that the problems I’m highlighting are way more important than choosing the right and wrong persons.
India is one of the countries with the highest number of suicide cases, and youth are struggling between questions to ask and answers that they yearn to hear.
Youth Suicides in India
India’s suicide mortality rate in 2016 was 16.5 per 100,000, well above the global average of 10.5 per 100,000, and the most vulnerable group is 15–29-year-olds.
In 2019, the annual suicide rates among Indian youth were a shocking 80 per 100,000 for females and 34 per 100,000 for males, compared to about 10 per 100,000 for the general population.
The rates of suicide have greatly increased among youth, and youth are now the group at highest risk in one-third of the developed and developing countries.
The day youth are truly given a seat at the table when the people in suits not only admire their ideas, but speak up like concerned parents for their emotional well-being that will be the day India’s freedom will rise again, not just as a memory of the past, but as a future where no young soul is left to suffer in silence.
And when countries like India begin to prioritise the hearts of their youth, we won’t just prevent breakdowns—we’ll build a generation strong enough to rewrite the world.
Global Youth Mental Health
As of 2019, 1 in 7 adolescents worldwide has a diagnosed mental disorder—about 166 million young people.
Depression and anxiety now account for roughly 40% of mental health disorders in 10–19 year-olds.
Globally, 1 in 4 youth shows clinically significant depressive symptoms, and 1 in 5 shows anxiety symptoms—rates that have doubled since before the pandemic.
Suicide ranks among the top four causes of death for adolescents aged 15–19 worldwide.
Poetry as Protest: Writing Through the Wreckage
Each page is etched with sorrow and grief, once oppressed, because I chose to follow my passion instead of society’s trend.
Once, I too stood at the edge of a shore, crafting my vision board with dreams, but the wind raged and blew them away, leaving behind nothing but an empty board.
I was abandoned, walking a path that was never mine.
And then I found the phrase—“The pen is mightier than the sword.”
I began drafting my debut poetry book to let the world hear my torment, my unheard cries that slowly consumed my passion and left a hollow soul behind.
Let me take you on a journey of emotions I once buried
BEFORE MY MUSE DIES
If only I could measure the unheard cries
The longing for listeners before my muse weeps and dies
I would make you weep for my heart’s hollowness
Like streaming blood yearns for clot to calm its madness.
Though I have parted, I can never be whole again
As I once assembled rhyme to form a poem’s verses in vain
For I long to be their solace, those who drown in sorrow, drenched in rain
To wash away the melancholy and let souls find their way back home again.
“Ashes of a Withered Choice” is for anyone who’s ever felt unseen, even while being the loudest in the room.
I made my torment, grief, and sorrow my strength to fight a world that sneaks into the lives of youth like an anonymous ghost.
Because identity is the very thing we’re all chasing.
If We Lead Tomorrow, Let Us Feel Today
The next generation of diplomats, changemakers, and policy writers is teenagers now.
If they’re taught to suppress emotion, they’ll lead with suppression too.
A trait may pass through generations, but if it comes without soul, it becomes tradition without meaning.
Sometimes, change doesn’t need to rise; it needs to descend.
We don’t always need to build taller towers sometimes; we need to rebuild the walls that silence us.
You cannot raise emotionally numb youth and expect them to craft an emotionally intelligent world.
Because when diplomacy is brought to the table by a youth, they must learn to begin with healing, not with ego.
It’s often said, “A beautiful beginning can never lead you to a significant end.”
What I mean is this:
A youth who has suffered deeply, if given a seat at the table without healing, will carry wounds as weapons and ego as protection.
And that’s the cost we pay for asking young people to chase dreams in a world that first broke them.
This Seat Is Not a Favour, It’s a Right
The youth can’t be taken for granted just because someone assumes, “They can’t feel deeply because they lack experience.”
But in a world evolving faster than ever, experience alone no longer defines insight, especially at global tables like the UN and MUN, where the present must begin listening to the voices that will shape the future.
If I were given a seat and asked to name one problem worth solving, I would say: bury your ashes of dreams or drown sorrow silently, turning your happiness into a quiet rage. What would you allow your child to choose?
I would like to end this on a note that—
Implement a dedicated course for youth mental health and emotional well-being. These are not soft or secondary issues. These are matters of survival. For the sake of young minds, these global bodies must act and stop ignoring the truth that diplomacy, at its core, is empathy transformed into policy. Or as I put it, Empathy served is territory born.
So look back into the pages of history and you’ll hear the pavement still screaming that—”The attire and glory of present India reveals that the nation’s youth cannot be dismissed as merely a myth of maturity—a truth proven by the martyrs of history.“
We’re not asking for permission. We’re demanding presence. And the world must learn to listen before another voice is lost to silence.