Psychiatry and Society

Some excerpts (reproduced with permission) from responses to my last post. " My Dad was a closet alcoholic " " ...asking for help on alcohol consumption for my friend's son who will soon turn 19 years...parents now try to monitor his timings, where he is but he is slippery and generally seems to be ahead of them. " People may know that a loved one requires help with an alcohol habit or other behavioural or emotional problem. The reluctance to seek help is mainly due to the stigma attached and the individuals lack of insight (blindness to the presence of the illness). How does the family or society (a neighbour) get the person to a psychiatrist or other mental health professional? Individual choice and potential for harm are in the balance I've listed out some methods  - by no means exhaustive - used successfully by other caregivers. They are in descending order of individual choice and autonomy. Use your discretion. How to get a ...

A family tragedy was played out through a small article in the Pune news . In a fit of rage a mentally ill woman set her daughter alight while she was asleep. The narrative was short and the item tucked into one of the inner pages under a largish headline.  This was the reason - the why - mental illness     A glib explanation for a horrific event lays the entire burden of its causation at the doors of a mental health disorder. The World Health Organisation  (WHO) has estimated that one in four persons  will have a mental health disorder at some stage of life . Violence is rarely a manifestation of mental illness In this rare cause of burning (mental illness), the burning of her daughter is an indicator of the severity of the mother's mental illness. Yet society, of which this news item is a barometer, has unquestioningly accepted mental illness as a sufficient cause. In a nation with about 0.48 mental health workers of any kind  for every 100...