Concerned at the acute shortage of doctors in mental healthcare, experts in the sector from various States have called for inclusion of Psychiatry as a separate subject in the MBBS curriculum for all under-graduate medical students to fill the vacuum in the area.
The demand is not without reason. Though the number of mentally ill patients is increasing at an alarming rate in India as also across the world, there are just 4,000 psychiatrists, 1,000 psychiatric social workers, 1,000 clinical psychologists and 900 psychiatric nurses in the country.
The demand for inclusion of the Psychiatry as a special subject in MBBS course has been long pending. The issue was once again raised recently at a meeting organised by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) with the State Health Secretaries to review the status of the mental health care in the country.
Dr N Thapa, senior psychiatrist from Gangtok Hospital, Assam said, “Given that mental illness is going to become huge burden in near future, teaching Psychiatry to MBBS students will help them deal with various difficult and complex situations during medical practice. This will also make the students to be more empathise with the patients and their suffering.”
Dr Jyoti Bindal, Director of the Gwalior-based Mansik Arogyashala, echoed similar views saying that while number of patients is on the rise, availability of human resource remain a huge issue in
the sector. Specialised training in Psychiatry at the MBBS level will help meet the demand, she added.
The experts were also of the opinion that if the medical officers at the primary health centres have adequate knowledge in Psychiatry, delivering mental health care would be cost-effective and practical.
They also demanded that all general medical practitioners must be provided training on basic mental healthcare while the medical staff put on duty in the sector should have a specialised training to sensitively deal with the problems of the mentally-ill patients.
Strengthening the rehabilitation mechanism under District Mental Health Programme, linking livelihood of the cured persons to their treatment, fine-tuning the District Mental Health Programme with an aim to pay special attention to the issues of homeless mentally-ill persons were some of the other suggestions from the representatives from Kerala, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh.
As per the Government data, annually at least 35 lakh Indians need hospitalisation on account of mental illnesses while the WHO predicts that atleast 20 per cent of India’s population will suffer from one or other type of mental illness by 2020.