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From 60 to 7000 patients in 3 years, Uttarakhand floods play havoc with mental health -Shivani Azad

-The Times of India

DEHRADUN: The number of patients with 'severe mental disorders' has multiplied an astounding 100 times in the last three years in Uttarakhand — from 60 in 2012 to almost 7,000 today as per data compiled by the state health department. A large part of the quantum jump, say worried health officials, can be attributed to the devastating floods of 2013 that killed thousands and displaced lakhs, with innumerable families still waiting for their missing kin to come back. Many are yet to get over the trauma, said doctors.

"That (the floods) led to a number of mental disorders like depression and schizophrenia," said an official, adding, "Of course, compounding it all are a number of factors like hectic lifestyles, increasingly disrupted family structure and growing unemployment among the youth."

Acknowledging that the problem was a serious one, J S Bisht, senior psychiatrist of the State Mental Health Institute, Sela Qui, said, "The rise in the number of cases of mental illness is a cause of concern. As a society, we should be sensitive towards people who are diagnosed with this illness. However, unfortunately, in Uttarakhand, patients are treated as cursed individuals. This stigma and discrimination is prevalent right from family members to hospital care givers. There are times when the family members of mental patients are not ready to take them back and we have to seek legal intervention through the district magistrate."

What is compounding the problem is that the state doesn't have any public rehabilitation centre for patients suffering from mental illnesses. This, when according to Bisht, Uttarakhand has 7% of its population reportedly suffering from some form of mental ailment.

Incidentally, the state has been planning to start a rehabilitation centre in Haridwar for the past six years. But the project seems to be moving at snail's pace. When TOI asked Vishnu Singh Dhanik, director, social welfare department, the reason for the delay, he said, "The proposals we had received for running the rehabilitation centres were not meeting the criteria set by us. But recently, we have received a few good proposals and we are mulling over outsourcing the mental rehabilitation work."

Interestingly, this year's mental health day's theme is 'dignity in mental health.' Psychiatrists say that a modicum of dignity is what every patient deserves. "We need to educate people that mental illness is not a stigma. In fact, if people are empathetic towards mentally ill patients, it helps these patients to get stabilized faster," says a psychiatrist in a government hospital.