SRINAGAR: Ahmad wants to tell the Herald about where he is from, but not what happened there.
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His home village, about three hours north, is near the disputed Line of Control, which separates Indian-controlled Kashmir from Pakistani territory, and has been the scene of constant insurgent attacks and regular enforced disappearances at the hands of army and police.
Barefoot and dressed in the hospital-issue pyjamas of a resident patient, Ahmad says he has been coming to Srinagar's government-run Psychiatric Diseases Hospital ''back and forwards'' for several months.
''My home is very beautiful. Good land, good farming. But, [it is a] bad place.''
Ahmad is suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, born of an as-yet unknown, and perhaps forever unknowable, trauma experienced at his home.
He feels better now and wants to return home but, more importantly, he recognises now that he'd been suffering in silence for years. He couldn't work, would go for days without speaking or leaving his house and lashed out in anger at anyone who tried to reach out to him.
He didn't know he needed help until his family brought him here.
Ahmad is, sadly, all-too representative of many in Kashmir: men and women, young and old.
While the rest of India forges ahead, disparate and disconnected Kashmir remains mired in a violent holding pattern - a waxing and waning pattern of conflict, of insurgent attacks on Indian security forces and army crackdowns on a restive population seething at what they see as an unwelcome armed occupation.
Since 1989, an armed insurgency has sought autonomy through violence for a Muslim province that does not feel a part of Hindu-majority India.
India has responded by flooding the area with half a million troops and giving the army extraordinary powers to arrest, detain and keep order.
After a generation of violence that has claimed, by conservative estimates, at least 40,000 lives, India's beautiful but troubled valley is reaping the consequences: a rising mental health epidemic. Kashmir's population is scarred.
In his office at the Psychiatric Diseases Hospital in Kashmir's biggest city, Srinagar, Mushtaq Margoob is too familiar with the figures to be shocked any more.
Besides, he says, he sees the consequences of Kashmir's violence, not in its effect on the population, but on each individual who comes through the hospital doors.
Almost 60 per cent of Kashmiris have seen or experienced a traumatic event at some stage in their lives, Dr Margoob's research has found.
Fifteen per cent of the population suffers lifetime post-traumatic stress, and one person in five is suffering chronic depression. Drug abuse, particularly addiction to sleeping tablets or opiates, has increased considerably in recent years.
Suicide is a taboo subject in the devoutly Muslim state, so many suicide deaths are never reported. But the few figures available offer an insight into the darkest corner of Kashmir's psyche.
Research from the Psychiatric Diseases Hospital says Kashmir's suicide rate has increased 40-fold since the militant insurgency against the Indian army began. Before 1989, Kashmir's suicide rate was 0.5 per 100,000 people. Still high by the standards of the Muslim world (which, typically, has a very low suicide rate of between 0.1 and 0.2), but the lowest in all of India.
By 2007, the suicide rate in Kashmir was estimated at up to 20 per 100,000, double the all-India average.
Women suffer most, Dr Margoob says, often because they are the ones left alive when and if the violence subsides.
Their reported rates of post-traumatic stress are similar to those of men, but depression rates are triple. The real figure is likely to be far higher, because many women are victims of sexual violence that is never reported, and its psychological consequences kept hidden.
In Kashmir, the stigma associated with mental illness is lessening. People are more willing to disclose and seek help for a mental illness than they were 10 or 20 years ago, but psychological problems are still under-reported, particularly in rural areas. Often professional care is only sought after a psychotic episode or, too often, a suicide attempt.
The hospital's finite resources are being stretched by an increasing number of patients requiring acute care, Dr Margoob says.
''In the 1970s there would be maybe four to five people visit here each day,'' he tells the Herald. ''They were psychotic people, brought here by their family members. After 1990, the number started increasing. By 1994, the number per year was 20,000, now it is one lakh, (100,000) people a year, about 270 people per day.''
Dr Margoob believes Kashmir's worst is yet to come. He says those who grew up since the insurgency began, who have known only years of violence and none of peace, have developed a ''learned helplessness''.
''You see youngsters struggling with their lives, you see them struggling with anger, aggression, many of them suicidal.
''I see the young generation as a 'trauma generation' because they are never knowing peaceful times. They have not been able to get a buffer system around themselves, to develop coping mechanisms. They see their elders always suffering, never being able to control their lives.''
Doing his rounds of the hospital's whitewashed wards, one of the clinic's young doctors, Majid Maqbool, speaks quietly with patients. Most spend their days here, in the spartan rooms of six or 12 beds, or sit in the grassed courtyard outside.
At the foot of one cast iron cot, a knot of concerned relatives speak earnestly with another doctor, discussing the plight of a prone patient, unmoving despite repeated entreaties to talk to her. Dr Maqbool says just being in Kashmir, living with the constant threat of violence and surrounded by people who have suffered violence, can be harmful to a person's mental health.
''I treated one young man for a very bad opiates addiction. He would spend six months on drugs, then was clean for six months. But his addiction was triggered just by coming into the Kashmir Valley on a bus. The moment he entered, he wanted drugs.'' For others, living in Kashmir has robbed them of everything they had. A woman brought to the clinic after a suicide attempt had lost six members of her family to the violence of Kashmir's insurgency. She refused all treatment.
''She said 'all my reasons for living are gone, they are all dead. For why should I be alive?'''
No one, says Dr Maqbool, is unscarred. ''Living in Kashmir, we are all affected in some way.''
