Volume 6 Issue 11 November, 2016
Mental health gap is a term used to indicate the number of people with mental illness not able to get the
treatment, expressed as percentage of total number of mentally ill. Excluding a very few developed nations, most
of the other countries have a huge mental health gap. In our country, the availability of qualified psychiatrist is still
less than 1 per a lakh population! Recently concluded National Mental Health Survey – 2016# revealed that the
prevalence of any mental disorder is 10.6% which translates to around 150 million people are in need for active
mental health interventions. Though there are numerous direct and indirect causes for this gap, the one worth
mentioning relevant to the intent of this newsletter is poor exposure to psychiatry in under graduate curriculum and
unfortunately no steps are being taken at policy making level to improve this! So most of the Indian Medical
Graduates may not be much confident in managing mental health problems. But with such an amount of gap
existing, it is almost certain that every doctor would be encountering many mentally ill in their practice but not in a
comfortable position to treat. WHO has come up with version 2 of mental health gap (mhGAP) intervention guide##
in non-specialized setting which helps non-psychiatrist doctors to deal with mental illness with evidence based
protocols. This may help in closing the gap to some extent when suitably backed up by Government policies and
financing to scale up mental health services.
BMCH&RC, Chitradurga (Karnataka)
