Bengaluru-based National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) will provide training to 10,000 mental health workers over a period of one year via a community-based initiative in collaboration with HelpAge India, an NGO working for the elderly. The ‘National Programme for Health Care of Elderly’ (NPHCE) will provide technical support to the initiative.

Nurses, healthcare workers and volunteers on geriatric mental health will be trained under the initiative known as ‘Sarthak’. The aim of the initiative is to help provide psychiatric support and effective interventions for mental health issues to senior citizens suffering from depression and dementia across the country, Indian Express reported. The initiative will be subsequently scaled-up.

A high proportion of elderly people have subsyndromal mental health issues, Dr PT Shivakumar, additional professor of psychiatry at NIMHANS, said. Caregivers and community workers need to be educated about mental health so that they can look out for signs showing mental health concerns.

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The collaboration with Help Age India will help in providing training to non-specialised health workers and community caregivers through a customised module for each category. Training will be provided through an online course.

The initiative was inaugurated by NITI Aayog member Dr Vinod K Paul who said the government was taking steps to deal with the scarcity of psychiatrists in the country by augmenting seats for psychiatry in medical colleges and emphasising on nursing care.

“Primary healthcare takes care of 90 percent of health problems that do not need specialists. A graded care model such as this is much required,” he added.

A report by the Longitudinal Ageing Study of India revealed that 14 million senior citizens in India would be impacted by mental health issues by 2050 from 5 million now.

At present, only 2 out of 10 older persons who are suffering from mental disorders receive any kind of support, Economic Times quoted Rumjhum Chatterjee, vice-chairperson of HelpAge India, as saying. She said while there was a need of approximately 13,000 psychiatrists to address various issues, the country has only 3,500. This means one psychiatrist attends to over 2 lakh people, Chatterjee added.

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