https://reasonstobecheerful.world/maanasi-mental-health-care-women/
"Last year, Geetha Jayaram flew back to the South Indian region of Karnataka
near Bangalore, where she grew up. She visited her very first patient there,
Eashwaramma. Twenty-five years ago, when the psychiatrist and the villager
first met, Eashwaramma had not left her home in two years.
“I realized she was in the midst of a severe depressive episode that was
complicated by panic disorder and agoraphobia,” Jayaram remembers the first
encounter. “Her fear of leaving the house was so great that she did not even
attend her own daughter’s wedding and could not help her husband in the fields.
Everybody was very worried about her. They said prayers, brought home the
priest and some thought she was possessed by the devil. I remember this first
meeting so well because she said the devil was sitting on her chest.”
Jayaram did what she had learned as a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins in
Baltimore: She began by giving the woman medication and explained her diagnosis
to her and her family. But the questions kept nagging at Jayaram: “Why had she
suffered unnecessarily for years? Why had most of the people I treated over the
past decades suffered unnecessarily for years? There is no health without
mental health.”
Mental health care remains scarce in India, especially in rural regions, and
the needs are enormous. Over 197 million people in a population of 1.3 billion
have mental disorders, most commonly depression and anxiety. The suicide rate
was at an all-time high in 2021 when 164,000 people died by suicide, or 120
suicide deaths per million people. India would need to add at least 100,000
psychiatrists to provide adequate mental health care, according to the
Indian
Journal of Psychiatry. “There is fewer than one psychiatrist for every 100,000
people,” Jayaram explains.
She knew she wanted to focus on women to make a difference: “Women suffer from
depression and anxiety twofold or threefold the rate of men globally. Yet women
are the key stakeholders in any community, the primary caregivers and drivers
of any health care in the villages, so we targeted women first. When we treat
women, we essentially take care of the entire family.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
