Moner Janala: A Curated Bengali Mental Health Advice Dataset from Newspaper Columns

Description

Moner Janala: A Bengali Mental Health Q&A Dataset from Prothom Alo Newspaper A curated dataset of 625 Bengali mental health Q&A pairs from Prothom Alo's "Moner Janala" (Window to the Mind) column, spanning 2009–2024. OVERVIEW -------- This dataset contains reader-submitted mental health questions and expert responses from Prothom Alo, Bangladesh's largest Bengali-language newspaper reaching approximately 50 million readers. The "Moner Janala" (Window to the Mind) column features questions from readers about psychological, personal, and family issues, with responses provided by Professor Mehtab Khanam from the Department of Education and Counseling Psychology at the University of Dhaka. DATASET STATISTICS ------------------ - Total records: 625 - Language: Bengali (বাংলা) - Date range: 2009–2024 - Expert: Prof. Mehtab Khanam, University of Dhaka - Source publication: Prothom Alo (www.prothomalo.com) DATA FIELDS ----------- - id: Unique identifier (1–625) - title: Article title (Bengali) - url: Source URL on Prothom Alo - date: Publication date (Bengali format) - problem: Reader-submitted mental health question (Bengali) - answer: Expert response by Prof. Mehtab Khanam (Bengali) MOTIVATION ---------- Bangladesh faces a severe mental health treatment gap: - 16.8% of adults have at least one mental disorder - Over 90% of adults with mental disorders receive no appropriate care - Only 0.44% of health budget allocated to mental health - 1.17 mental health workers per 100,000 population Newspaper advice columns function as de facto community mental health resources in low- and middle-income countries. This dataset provides the first large-scale empirical resource for studying Bengali mental health discourse. TOPICS COVERED -------------- - Marital issues and domestic dynamics - Interfaith and intercultural relationships - Communication difficulties - Family relationships and parenting - Depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions - Social pressure and stigma - Help-seeking behavior USE CASES --------- NLP/ML Research: Bengali text classification, low-resource language modeling, dialogue summarization, response generation, cross-lingual transfer learning. Mental Health Research: Help-seeking patterns in South Asia, cultural framing of mental health, stigma analysis in media. Public Health: Needs assessment for Bangladesh, SDG 3.4 monitoring, WHO mhGAP alignment. Clinical Training: Cultural competency case studies, response pattern analysis. CITATION -------- Mollah, M. A. R., & Nabil, A. N. (2026). Moner Janala: A Bengali Mental Health Q&A Dataset from Prothom Alo Newspaper. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21481172 LICENSE ------- This dataset is provided for non-commercial research and educational use. Original article content is copyright Prothom Alo (www.prothomalo.com). See LICENSE.txt for full terms.

Institutions

• Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology

  Rajshahi Division, Rajshahi
• Jahangirnagar University

  Dhaka Division, Dhaka

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