Mental health in India has been neglected for ages. One of the main reasons is that there are only .2 per cent psychiatrists for one lakh people. Out of every 1000 person, around 65 person suffer from one or more than one form of mental disorder, says Prof Savita Malhotra of the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research here.
Mostly, psychiatrists are located in the cities and the people residing in remote areas fail to get proper treatment when it comes to mental health. People from rural areas have to travel long distances and spend a lot of money to get psychiatric consultation.
“To cope with this problem we have designed a special software with help from experts of the Tata Consultancy Services to reach out to more and more people and to provide them proper psychiatric treatment,” adds Malhotra, Head of the Department of Psychiatry, PGI.
The project’s name is ‘Development and Implementation of Model Tele-psychiatry Application for Delivering Mental Healthcare in Remote Areas (Using Medical Knowledge Based Decision Support System)’.
The Department of Psychiatry, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research has been running an innovative net-based application for diagnosis and management of patients with common psychiatric disorders. In this project, PGIMER is a nodal centre and there is a team of psychiatrists, psychologists and computer operators, working round the clock for the past three years in the hilly states of Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.
This was conceived after the National Mental Health Programme of the Government of India which aimed at training common medical practitioners for identifying mental ailments failed to reap fruit in the last few decades, say experts.
Malhotra said “a model that existed to take mental healthcare to the peripheral areas has not succeeded in the past. Hence, experts decided to exploit technology and bridge the gap between number of patients and doctors.”
Software has been created to diagnose mental health patients based on a set of questions designed for the programme. Depending on the diagnosis, medication will be prescribed. The treatment will be based after scrutinising the details of a patient’s health profile.
“It takes around half an hour to diagnose a patient. The programme designed is disorder-specific and complete comprehensive treatment method has been developed which is currently made available to only a set of experts to provide mental aid to patients,” added Savita Malhotra.
However, Malhotra said that if the model was successful it would be available to the patients for use as a mobile application. Currently, a lot of research and development is being made based on research to make the system full proof. This would be a great achievement because it would help patients who don’t go for mental health treatment as certain stigma is attached to it in the current Indian social order, she added.