The World Health Organisation commemorated the annual mental health day in October 2012. It came with a warning that depression, apsychiatric illness and a major contributor to high suicide rates, could become a global crisis.The situation in Pakistan is quite alarming as far as the state of mental illness and the infrastructure to treat it is concerned. More than 14 million people suffer from mild to moderate psychiatric illnesses, butonly one psychiatrist is available for every 10,000 persons suffering from amental disorder. Only one child psychiatrist is available for four million children who are believed to be suffering from mental diseases.
A more alarming fact is that the majority of patients are womenin their middleage;they develop a mental illness due to various reasons: declining family income, their son or husbandbecoming addicted to drugs, loss of normalcy in day-to-day life.
For the last decade, Dr Mufti has been channelling the income of his private hospital to the rehabilitation of mentally unwell persons, regardless of their financial statuses
“These are, ironically, the best times for the psychiatrists to make good fortunes,” says Dr Khalid Mufti, a renowned psychiatrist running a hospital in Peshawar. He noted that mental diseases are spreading on an epidemic scale in the KhyberPakhtunkhwa, a province that has for yearsfaced terrorism.
Dr Mufti had visited Afghanistan during the 1990s and observed the miseries of the war-affected people with his own eyes. He had wondered what would happen to the Afghan society after the traumatised children reached the age of maturity and took matters into their hands. With a resolve to raise the building blocks against the impending disaster, he became involved in philanthropy and established “Horizon” to start research and arrange free treatment ofpeople not only visiting him from Afghanistan but also the victims of the Taliban insurgency in the erstwhile FATA, and later, the internally displaced personsas well.
For the last decade, Dr Mufti has been channelling the income of his private hospital to the rehabilitation of mentally unwell persons, regardless of their financial statuses. Two years ago, I talked to Dr Mufti, and he was thinking about transforming his mission to heal the wounds of the strife-torn society into a mass movement by engaging media,particularly radio, and preachers and priests.
Child abuse was another one of his concerns. His philanthropic undertaking Horizon had launched an awareness drive to convince parents to get children, mostly abused by close relatives and neighbours, treated well in time to help them live a normal life again. “We have to develop ourselves into a child-focused society to be counted in the comity of developed nations,” Dr Mufti had opined. But a lot has happened to Horizon, and its capacity to deliver since the economic slowdown has brought forth a regime with compromising credentials. The funds previously made available to Horizon from Dr Mufti’s private hospital have landed in the provincial kitty, thanks to the government’s efforts to target businesses to overcome its ever-widening fiscal deficit.Though Horizon’s budget has been drastically cut down, patients keep pouring in with ever increasing numbers; most of them arewomen from poor families. The extensive counselling process has revealed that the worries of his patients are rooted in the vicious cycle of poverty, and the absence of a caring government is noticeable in these testing times.
Though one might not be sure whether government, not just in KP but elsewhere in Pakistan,has the resources to meet any of its targets,it has made Dr Mufti’s journey longer, rather, uncertain, given his age factor and also the stress he recently underwent while convincing the authorities to recognise the worth of a little bit of healthcare infrastructure to handle the epidemic of mental disorders in KP.
Dr Mufti concedes, very sorrowfully, that bad governance in which people are heavily taxed but are paid back little in terms of basic amenities of life-health, hygiene,education and clean water-isthe ultimate reason behind growing incidents of mental disorder. Consistent economic downturn is placing the huge burden of mental diseases on the weaker sections of society.
Women, children and the elderly are left unattended, in a cutthroat competition for food and healthcare, making them prey to a variety of mental diseases.”The problem of mental diseases is getting unmanageable,” says Dr Mufti, pointing towards the dearth of psychiatrists and the necessary healthcare infrastructure to tackle the epidemic of mental diseases.
To Dr Mufti, given the unattended psychological consequences of the whole militancy-driven mess, which the Afghans and tribesmen on our side have gone through during the last three decades, KP’s burden of mental illness is exceptional. Good governanceis the way out for KP and the rest of Pakistan toimprovethe mental healthcare infrastructure.
The writer is an Islamabad-based veteran journalist and an independent researcher