PAKISTAN DATA ANALYTICS & VISUALIZATION

According to the CSSEGISandData as of the 17th of April 2021, Pakistan is seeing approximately 5000 new cases of COVID-19 a day, and as stated by dw.com, “Pakistan is grappling with a slow vaccine rollout and impatience with lockdown measures, as new infections surge in the South Asian country.” Covid-19 is here to stay for quite some time in Pakistan; this pandemic is not only affecting the physical health of the general population but we are also seeing a mental health pandemic amongst Pakistani citizens. We are going to go in depth both through the numbers and cultural explanations as to to the causes of this surge.

METHOD OF ANALYSIS

Our team analyzed the dataset of mental health performance using Rapidminer to see the pattern the rise of depression amongst students and the time spent with family. Tableau is used to visualize our findings during the pandemic. Moreover, we are using the classification technique and decision tree algorithm to see the depression class.

DECISION TREE

Pakistani students above 18 years old are more likely to have depression compared to younger students. Regardless of the time spent with families, all students still faced depression during the pandemic time and even depression issues existed at a very young age between 1 to 13 years old. However, students between the ages of 13 to 18 years, who spend between 4 to 6 hours are feeling fine during the time. It can be seen that as age increases, many students suffer from depression and there is a lower prevalence of depression among students those 25 years and older.

PERFORMANCE OUTPUT

The performance of the model is that a small number of 7 students who are actually having depression are predicted that they are doing fine. While 77 students who are actually doing fine are predicted to have depression. However, the accuracy of the model is acceptable when showing 65% of accuracy on how the model predicts depression issues among Pakistani students.

DATA VISUALIZATION

GRAPH 1

The graph shows that the majority of students in Pakistan which is 160 to 240 students experienced depression during the pandemic. The graph shows that the predominant age group experiencing depression are those between the ages of 18-25 with 135 students, followed by students within the age group of 25-40 with 28 students. From this graph we can see that there is a pattern of increased depression amongst the age group of 18-25 years.

GRAPH 2

The graph shows that many students in Pakistan spent more time with their families, especially students with the age group between 18 to 25 with a total of 65 students spending 4 to 6 hours with their family. This is followed by 16 students between the ages of 25 to 45 years who spent the same amount of time. To conclude, the pattern of time spent with families during pandemic time fluctuates as ages increase but 4 to 6 hours time with families remains the highest for all age groups.

First step in remedying an issue is to address it, which might be the problem in Pakistani society. Albeit the government of Pakistan provided 26 page documents that goes through guidelines and advisements of managing mental health impacts of constant lockdowns and stresses induced by the covid-19 pandemic. There are also many non-governmental organizations that are attempting to help this issue. But the real issue is the stigmatization of mental health in Pakistani societies and how little it is being considered.

RESEARCH

Study conducted to measure depression, anxiety and stress during pandemic Covid-19 shows that Pakistan has high scores among other countries. Due to pandemic, where there are movement restrictions and some students unable to meet families has given them hard times, especially they need social support to adapt to online learning. Moreover, Pakistani culture relies strongly on family and community engagement, so social isolation will have a greater impact on mental health (Shah et al., 2021).

According to the US National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health, about one third of the Pakistani population holds supernatural beliefs pertaining to the causes of depression. Many also hold the opinion that depression is “due to lack of stamina and will-power”(MH et al, 2016). This in turn causes many Pakistanis to suppress their mental health problems and not seek professional help. Seeking professional help is also not an easy task for the average Pakistani person, as according to the International Journal of Social Psychiatry there is a ratio of 1 psychiatrist to 100,000 citizens in Pakistan. This is both illustrated by the first and the second graph, many students are spending more time with their parents who hold such cultural beliefs, which in turn causes the student to both suppress and elongate the effect of their mental health problems and not seek professional treatment.

There are of course other reasons for Pakistani students to feel stressed, as according to the bmj There are “55 million people living below the poverty line” and that “most of the private organizations are firing employees or reducing their salary by 50%” due to the pandemic (Hussain, 2020).

CONCLUSION

The culture around mental health problems, economic devastation, and personal beliefs on mental health are all cumulatively and disadvantageously affecting the mental health of Pakistanis, this all might explain the pattern seen through the aforementioned data analysis of rising mental health problems in Pakistan.

CITATIONS

CSSEGISandData. (2021). https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/commits?author=CSSEGISandData

Harat-Nazimi, W. (n.d.). Pakistan struggles to contain third COVID wave. Deutsche Welle. www.dw.com/en/pakistan-struggles-to-contain-third-covid-wave/av-57135712

Hussain, L. (2020). Mental health crises in Pakistan during Covid-19 pandemic. www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1994/rr-0

Medicine, N. L. of. (n.d.). No Title. National Library of Medicine. Retrieved April 16, 2021, from https://www.nlm.nih.gov/

Mumtaz, M. (2020). COVID-19 and mental health challenges in Pakistan. International Journal of Social Psychiatry. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/0020764020954487

Shah, S. M. A., Mohammad, D., Qureshi, M. F. H., Abbas, M. Z., & Aleem, S. (2021). Prevalence, Psychological Responses and Associated Correlates of Depression, Anxiety and Stress in a Global Population, During the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Pandemic. Community Mental Health Journal, 57(1), 101–110. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-020-00728-y

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