Audiovisual Aids in Psychiatry

Progress and evolution are basic qualities of life. Psychiatry has also tended to progress. In the process of this unending evolution it has tended to utilize the progress in all other branches of science. Utilisation of Audiovisual Aids is one of the latest examples. Audio Visual Aids have proved to be useful in the training of psychiatrists in diagnosis, management as well as research. Psychiatry is a branch of medicine in which there is still a lot of subjectivity. Recognition of various signs and symptoms is many a times influenced by clinician's own personality and personal biases. It takes a long time for a learner to pickup the detail and intricacies of the field because he can not learn until he encounteis each situation. Use of audiovisual aids makes this task easier by providing exposure to the wide spectrum of clinical presentations in a limited time. It has always been a problem how to point out the omissions of observations during a psychotherapeutic session. Presence of another person during the therapy inhibits the progression of session. On the other hand if a student of psychotherapy conducts the session alone, he is unable to make use of experience of his teachers to the maximum because he tends to miss many of the observations that trained eyes of his seniors would have made. The introduction of video has substantially removed these difficulties. A video replay of the session conducted by the trainee can later be scrutinised and all omissions and errors can be pointed out. Video recorded interviews can also be used for communication and exchange of ideas between therapists of different centres in the case of clinically interesting patients. This avoids the embarrassment of repeated stereotyped interview being conducted with the same patient. Video recorded lectures have been a long recognised mode of communication in teaching which is being practiced in psychiatry too. The use of video in diagnosis brings more objectivity and precision. For example in rating of tardive-dyskinesia, video recording of the patients during an interview of fixed time period and then counting the abnormal movements on replay introduces a fixed measurement and thus does away with subjective biases, human errors and chances of omissions on the part of examiner. This helps in giving more objective data useful for statistical analysis for the purpose of research. Recently there has been an increasing awareness of necessity of conducting parallel researches …