Proactive case finding for severe mental illness in a rural area in the Indian Punjab: findings and lessons
- PDF / 340,425 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 111 Downloads / 147 Views
BRIEF REPORT
Proactive case finding for severe mental illness in a rural area in the Indian Punjab: findings and lessons Shubh Mohan Singh1 · Anish Shouan1 · B. Sai Chiatanya Reddy1 · Aarzoo Suman1 · Sanjana Kathiravan1 · Prit Pal1 · Vikram Yadav1 Received: 18 June 2020 / Accepted: 24 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract People with severe mental illnesses may experience barriers in accessing community mental health services. We used the key informant method to detect people with untreated severe mental illness in seven villages in the Indian state of Punjab. The key informant was a local community leader. We were able to contact 11 patients who were identified as suffering from severe mental illness by the key informants. On assessment, eight of them had intellectual disability and three had psychotic and affective illness. We discuss the barriers and opportunities for providing mental health services in the community.
Introduction A majority of patients approaching primary care community psychiatry outpatient services comprise of the so-called ‘common mental disorders’ [1]. It is possible that there may be patients with severe mental illness (SMI) in the community who are not able to reach the mental health services due to various barriers. This can lead to underutilisation of mental health services (MHS). The underutilization of mental health services (MHS) is a contributor to the mental health gap in many parts of the world including India [2–4]. To overcome this, different strategies have been devised to enable MHS to reach the unreached [5]. A method that has not been studied as much is that of proactive community case detection [6]. This involves the active detection (by some method) of unidentified or unserved patients in the community rather than waiting for the patient to approach the health services. There are obvious advantages to this strategy in that it bypasses the barriers that prevent potential consumers of MHS from approaching and utilising healthcare. We present the findings and implications of our efforts at proactive case finding using a key informant technique for severely mentally ill patients in a rural area in the Punjab state of North India as a part of the mandate of the * Shubh Mohan Singh [email protected] 1
Department of Psychiatry, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India
community psychiatry service of the department of psychiatry of a tertiary hospital in the region [7].
Methodology The department of psychiatry of a tertiary hospital in North India runs a community psychiatry service (CP) which is based on the outpatient satellite clinic model using existing health care facility premises. One of these centres is the twin villages of Nandpur–Kalour (NK) in Fatehgarh Sahib district of Punjab [8]. This village is around 35 km from the hospital. The department has a memorandum of understanding with the panchayat (local administrative unit) of the village for the same since 2016. The panchayat
Data Loading...
