Human Resources for Mental Health Care in India - Challenges and Opportunities

It was in November 1983, Prof. Wig and I, published an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry titled “A training approach to enhance the availability of mental health manpower in a developing country”(Srinivasa Murthy and Wig,1983). This article presented the case for involving the peripheral health workers in providing essential mental health care, as a way of addressing the problem of limited number of mental health specialists. This was a follow up of an earlier article on the rural model for mental health care (Wig et al, 1981). Twenty years later, the issues addressed by us have a greater urgency for two reasons. Firstly, ideas that appeared very innovative, that is to integrate mental health care with general health care, is now the accepted national model for mental health programme (Agarwal et al., 2004). Secondly, there is so much more of awareness of mental health issues and the demand for services, far beyond the health sector, that the need to relook at human resources for mental health care is even more urgent (Patel and Thara, 2003, Goel et al, 2004). It is in this context that the current article presents the needs for human resources and suggests a broad approach to address the need.