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‘I chained him to protect him from the spirits.’ What are the challenges for psychiatrists in India?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Sukhmeet Singh
Sukhmeet Singh*
Affiliation:
Cambridgeshire Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust; University of Cambridge, UK, email sukhmeetsingh@nhs.net
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Approximately 20% of the adult Indian population are affected by a psychiatric disorder that requires intervention from a mental health professional (Math & Srinivasaraju, 2010). In spite of this, the provision of mental healthcare is poor. Therefore, to learn more, between July and August 2014 I undertook a 4-week elective at the Psychiatry Department of Sawai Man Singh (SMS) Hospital in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. The Psychiatry Department was founded in 1952. It has a total of 332 beds, with nearly 20 000 patients admitted per year and an attendance of nearly 100 000 annually at the out-patient department.

Type
Global Echoes
Information
BJPsych International , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , November 2017 , pp. 100 - 102
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2017

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