Punjab government has announced that a Mental Health Authority (MHA) will soon be established in the province.
The authority will be put in charge of treatment facilities for mental health patients but it is yet to be seen how its work will differ from that of the Pakistan Institute of Mental Health (PIMH).
It is likely the MHA will provide more legitimacy for the Mental Health Ordinance (MHO) which was enacted in 2001. The MHO had replaced the colonial era Lunacy Act of 1912) — an archaic law which among other objectionable clauses placed little importance on the consent of the patient prior to treatment.
While the MHO was drastically better than the Lunacy Act, in January 2010, it was discovered that the Sindh High Court ordered a lawyer to refer a client to a psychiatrist under the Lunacy Act 1912 — raising concerns about whether lawyers and law enforcement agencies even knew about the revised ordinance.
We have been told that the authority will consist of 10 members — most of them will be mental health professionals. It will have an advisory role and will recommend measures to improve existing mental health services.
The establishment of a high-level authority is a good sign for improving the state of affairs in the mental healthcare sector. For the multitude of mental health institutions in Lahore and across the province, the MHA will be a major means of support in a field which has been neglected both institutionally and culturally.
But the formation of the MHA will not achieve much in terms of solving the dire shortage of mental health professionals, psychologists and psychiatrists — which is a huge concern for the sector across the country. The provincial government could consider empowering the MHA and providing it with resources so that it could incentive students to pursue careers in the field — through scholarships. Mental health patients are subject to government negligence because their treatment is more complex and requires a different kind of training for nurses, doctors and care providers. However, the government must be mindful that psychological treatment is a part of every patient’s well-being, be it a mental health case or a bodily ailment.
With news laws and institutions — there will be a need for raising awareness among the public as well. *
Published in Daily Times, October 16th 2017.