Feature 
 

Mental Health

Care Without Caring?

Pakistan is a trauma-exposed society, shaped by Partition, political instability, economic insecurity, terrorism, natural disasters, and chronic stress.

By Irfan Mustafa | June 2026


While I am not a healthcare professional, my engagement with Pakistan’s health sector has been indirect, through association with hospitals, conversations with clinicians, and involvement in institutional initiatives, particularly in mental health.
Mental health is a subject very close to my heart. For many decades, I have had meaningful encounters with issues related to mental health, both on a deeply personal level and in my professional and socio-entrepreneurial life.

On a personal level, I witnessed something that marked me forever. My first cousin, younger than me and like a brother, took his own life several years ago. At the time, we did not understand what bipolar disorder was. We did not recognise the signs. We did not have the language, awareness, or framework to understand bipolar disorder.

That loss stayed with me.

Over time, I also had to confront my own inner child, unresolved trauma, and the ways in which unaddressed emotional struggles can quietly ripple into one’s closest family.

Mental health is not an abstract subject for me; it has lived in my heart.

Professionally, during my years as Chief Global Leadership Development Officer at Yum Brands, I found myself increasingly drawn towards the human dimension of performance. We ran leadership development programmes in collaboration with senior leadership and a husband-and-wife team of therapists to help senior executives confront personal challenges that were limiting their impact. What became clear was this: professional excellence often rests on emotional clarity. When individuals addressed their internal struggles, they led more effectively, built healthier teams, created stronger organisations, and managed family relationships with care and respect.

That personal and professional journey ultimately led to the co-founding of Taskeen Mental Health Institution, a pioneering initiative aimed at preventing mental health issues. It felt like a natural culmination of experiences that had been converging for years. My thoughts, therefore, are shaped by a holistic understanding of this subject.

It is from this vantage point that a recurring question has stayed with me: why do health outcomes often fall short even when competent doctors, established institutions, and available treatments are in place?

Patients return repeatedly with the same complaints. Medications are stopped early. Second and third opinions are sought. Advice is listened to politely and then quietly set aside. These patterns are familiar to anyone who has spent time around hospitals, yet they are usually explained away as issues of awareness, literacy, or patient behaviour. Perhaps those explanations are incomplete.

Pakistan’s health debate often focuses on capacity: hospitals, beds, doctors, equipment and resources. While these constraints are real, they do not fully explain why health outcomes remain weak. Our largely biomedical system of diagnosis, prescribing, and intervention is necessary, but it often overlooks the human reality of illness.

Pakistan is a trauma-exposed society, shaped by Partition, political instability, economic insecurity, terrorism, natural disasters, and chronic stress. These experiences influence how people think, cope, trust, and respond to treatment.

These experiences do not remain neatly outside the clinic door. Prolonged stress affects how people engage with authority and advice. Trauma can shape attention, motivation, coping behaviour and trust, all of which matter deeply when treatment depends on long-term adherence. Economic anxiety influences diet, sleep, and lifestyle choices, while emotional distress often appears through physical symptoms, especially where mental health remains difficult to discuss openly.

Mental health practitioners describe well-being through a biopsychosocial lens, recognising that biological factors, psychological struggles and social realities all interact. The body influences the mind; the mind shapes the body; and society frames both.

When these realities are overlooked, a strictly biomedical approach risks missing the full picture. Disease may be identified correctly, but the person carrying it remains only partially understood.

Mental health brings this into especially sharp focus. Clinical knowledge and treatments exist, yet engagement remains fragile and stigma persistent.


Through my involvement in co-founding Taskeen, one lesson became difficult to ignore: outcomes often depended less on the sophistication of treatment than on trust, continuity, dignity, emotional safety, and whether patients genuinely felt heard.

From what I have seen, outcomes improve not merely through more infrastructure, but through trust, dignity, continuity of care, and emotional safety. Comprehensive assessment matters. Multidisciplinary collaboration matters. Coordination between mental health professionals, social workers, and primary care matters. But above all, recognising the human being as a whole, not just a collection of symptoms, matters. This raises an idea that warrants wider discussion: the distinction between healthcare and human care.

Human care does not reject medicine or expertise. It simply acknowledges that patients are human beings embedded in families, communities, beliefs, and economic realities. It recognises that fear, shame, uncertainty, and social pressure influence behaviour as much as medical advice does. It treats listening, continuity and emotional safety as meaningful components of care, not optional extras.

For Pakistan, this is neither a foreign nor a fashionable concept. Health decisions here are rarely individual. Illness is negotiated within families. Care is shaped by financial stress, cultural expectations, religion, and deeply held social values. Ignoring this context does not make care more scientific; it often makes it less effective.

Our dominant health challenges today, including diabetes, heart disease, respiratory illness, maternal and child health concerns, and mental health disorders, are largely chronic and behaviour-sensitive. They unfold over years, not in single consultations. They cannot be managed effectively through brief, transactional encounters alone.

This is not an indictment of doctors. Clinicians operate under immense pressure, constrained by time, volume, and resources. The issue appears to be one of system design rather than individual intent. Systems optimised primarily for throughput and acute intervention may struggle to support sustained engagement, multidisciplinary coordination and long-term trust.

This is also not about diminishing personal responsibility. Individual discipline and agency are critical. But systems must acknowledge the human context in which that responsibility is exercised. The instinctive response is to call for more capacity: more hospitals, more technology, more funding. All are necessary. But expanding capacity without rethinking the nature of care risks replicating the same limitations at a larger scale.
A human care lens does not offer quick fixes. It raises quieter, more uncomfortable questions. What if continuity mattered as much as speed? What if communication were treated as a skill to be cultivated rather than an assumed trait? What if mental health were integrated into routine care instead of remaining marginal? What if collaboration among physicians, mental health professionals, social workers, and community systems became part of mainstream healthcare rather than an isolated exception? What if trust were seen not as a soft concept, but as a strategic asset of the health system itself?

Before expanding the number of hospitals, it might be worth Pakistan taking a moment to reflect not just on how much healthcare is needed, but also on the kind of care the country truly wants to provide: is it focused on treating diseases, or on supporting the people who live with them?
Ultimately, I have come to believe something simple yet profound: a healthier individual creates a healthier family. A healthier family builds a healthier society. And a healthier society will give rise to a stronger, more confident Pakistan, one capable of marching forward to realize the immense potential that has eluded us for far too long.

The distinction between healthcare and human care may hold greater significance than it initially appears. It is hoped that this reality will stimulate a discussion on a public platform and attract attention from the diverse sectors within the health industry.

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