Daily Times

LARKANA: The Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Medical University (MBBSMC) Vice-Chancellor Prof. Ghulam Asghar Channa said on Thursday that healthy minds could produce healthy society, and the field of psychology could have played a vital role in developing healthy minds, however, it had been greatly neglected.

Reportedly, he addressed a seminar, and referred to the Sindh Mental Health (Amendment) Bill, passed by the Sindh Assembly in 2015, for providing relief to a person who attempted to commit suicide by an effective treatment through psychology rather than ‘sending them behind bars’.

He called patients suffering from a mental disorder as ‘like other patients suffering from fatal diseases’.

Meanwhile, the department of psychology head Prof Dr Badaruddin Junejo asserted that the purpose of the seminar was to inform relatives of the patients that they could be treated, and subsequently play an active role to build a healthy society.

He said that patients who had tried to commit suicide should be brought to psychiatrists for treatment.

Furthermore, the superintendent of police (SP) Babar Javed said that the patients suffering from certain mental disorders were also human beings, and according to human rights, they deserved proper treatment instead of prison. He pledged to appoint one psychiatrist at every police station as Dr Ali Gul Tunio remarked that crime rate in the society had increased due to mental illnesses and chronic depression amongst the youths. “Psycho patients deserve sympathy not anger,” he said.

Former Senator Dr Karim Khawaja stated that if a mind was healthy then other parts of the body would follow the same, and claimed that deadly diseases were a result of mental illnesses.

He maintained that the Sindh Mental Health Bill should be implemented in its true spirit and essence.

Besides, a large number of professors, doctors, students and members of civil society were also present on the occasion.

Published in Daily Times, August 17^th 2018.