In this episode we want to shine a light on teen mental health.

3 teenager suicides took place around June of this year, one after another. All of these suicides were linked by authorities to a popular video game called Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG. Here is a Gulf News article that we read out on the podcast. The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) responded by putting a temporary ban on the game on July 1st, calling it “addictive, and waste of time”. The ban was lifted a few weeks later, but it had already started a flurry of discussions and feedback on the internet.

This episode’s guest: Aisha Sanober.

Aisha is a child psychiatrist in Pakistan, and one of very few people in the country to have completed a fellowship in adolescent psychiatry. She is a much-needed expert in a starving field that doesn’t get enough focus in Pakistan – the mental health of our youth. The focus of this discussion is to answer the question : are video games the actual problem here, or is it something else ? And what can we, both parents and children, do to mitigate this issue?