Mumbai: For the first time the civic-run King Edward Memorial (KEM) hospital is organising a one day workshop on mental health in which they will help undergraduate medical students in identifying the signs and symptoms of mental illness among people. The workshop will be held today on July 10 and Dr Shubhangi Parkar, head of the psychiatric department will also be a part of the workshop.
The main objective of this workshop is to help identify a ‘psychological crisis,’ which will help students in identifying patients with depression and other mental health-related illnesses, so that they can start treatment early and thus refer patients to a psychiatrist.
“Nearly 180 medical students will be participating and will be split into groups so that it will become easy to make them explain about mental health. The workshop will train students on how to identify signs of mental illness? What is mental illness? How do we recognise the symptoms? and way of communication with the patients,” said the doctors.
Dr Hemant Deshmukh, Dean, KEM Hospital, said, it will help the medical students to reduce their mental stress and they will be able to tackle patients battling with mental health issues. “The cases related to mental health issues are increasing due to which most of them are affected by depression. So it is necessary to get these people out of depression. This workshop will help them to handle serious cases of mental illness,” said Dr Deshmukh.
Currently this workshop is aimed at training the undergraduate medical students. Later, there will be workshops held for resident and intern doctors. This will help the doctors to identify mental illness cases in their friends' circle, family and neighbours. “Through this they can help refer them to a psychiatrist so that a person with a mental health issue can be treated,” he added.
City-based psychiatrists have welcomed this move stating that this workshop will benefit doctors and patients as most of the time it gets difficult for the doctors to handle patients who are suffering from mental health issues.
