Pakistan, Oct. 15 -- There are screams that no ear registers, not because they are faint, but because society has trained itself not to hear them. Behind the drawn curtains of ordinary homes, in crowded university corridors and across the scorched fields of rural Punjab and Sindh, millions of Pakistanis wage solitary wars against depression, anxiety, trauma and despair. Their battles leave no visible wounds and earn no ceremony. Where the systems to reach them do not exist, their pain compounds silently, relentlessly and too often fatally.

World Mental Health Day, observed every 10 October and founded by the World Federation for Mental Health in 1992, is a moral summons to confront this reality. This year's theme, "Caring for the Mind", ...