According to easiest classifications of diseases there aretwo types of psychiatric ailments mainly neurotic and psychotic. In neuroticdiseases patient does not loose contact with reality that’s patient can tellyou name, address, locality correctly while in psychotic ailments patientscontact with reality is lost and patient lives in world of his/her own, patientoften reports of seeing angels, strange animals or hears voices or sounds whichnobody else sitting with patient sees or hears. One example of psychoticailments is schizophrenia, which some people refer as madness , but factremains that its prevalence in any place is as low as 0.5 per 1000 [AHUJA BOOKOF PSYCHIATRY] while ailments like depression, anxiety, phobia form bulk ofload in Psychiatric ailments. In spite of getting best education we as asociety have not been able to differentiate between two, so stigma remainsattached with psychiatric ailments thus delaying diagnosis and treatment, it’sbecause of this stigma people visit psychiatric settings with faces covered ormasked. Young adults and children fear to disclose to their parents if theysuffer from depression or anxiety disorders, which leads them to live animpaired life, loss of interest in studies or even loss of job as theirbehaviour of lack of concentrating or easy fatigue leads to cascade ofproblems. Parents are there to discipline and guide children but not to makethem scare of depression. Another problem hitting psychiatric health care inKashmir is the myth that all medicines prescribed by psychiatrists cause sleep,while fact is that Psychiatric medicine work by increasing, changing orblocking activities of neurotransmitters. Nerves carry information from the body to the brain and vice versa. Thebrain is composed of roughly 86 Billion neurons. Chemical messengers calledneurotransmitters carry messages between neurons to help the brain receive theinformation, decide what it means and execute a reaction. Neurotransmitters are responsible foremotional regulation, pain perception, motivation, concentration, memoryenergy, mood, sleep patterns, libido. Any imbalance can result in Depression,Nightmares, Mental Fatigue, Anxiety, Impaired cognition, attention, andarousal, Apathy, Lack of motivation, Poor attention, and Fatigue. Most of thetime a qualified psychiatrist uses anti-depressants which do not cause sleep, in first few months of treatmentdepending upon the psychiatric ailment anxiolytics, also known as’tranquilizers’ are used.
So let’s stop assuming that all medicines cause sleep and wewill be dependent on them for rest of our life.
The biggest challenge faced by doctors of today andspecially psychiatrists is that due to easy availability of internet mostpatients start Google searching medicine for 8 minutes prescribed by a doctorwho studied medicine for 8 years, fact is that not all information surfers geton medicine by Google search is authenticated. Patients are well advised toseek such information from doctor rather than what is searched on internet orwhat a specialist from other field like education or engineering has to say!
We need to fight epidemic of psychiatric ailments includingdrug abuse on basis of science and not search on internet, it’s as simple asthat, to aware common people doctors, counsellors from field of mental healthneed to work vigorously in community to clear myths and mist surrounding psychiatricailments. We need to give patients of anxiety disorders or drug abuse respectand not scare them with unfounded information. Also next time we label someperson as mad for being stressed kindly read this survey of again ” Nearly 1.8million adults (45% of the population) in the Kashmir Valley show symptoms ofsignificant mental distress according to a comprehensive mental health surveyconducted by the medical humanitarian organisation Médecins SansFrontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) between October and December 2015. Theresearch was done in collaboration with the Department of Psychology, KashmirUniversity and the Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience (IMHANS).