Staff Reporter The experts have maintained that in most of the cases, patients with psychiatric illnesses often report to general practitioners and family physicians and remain under their treatment for years, as common people often fail to identify themselves as patients with mental illnesses. They called for creating awareness among the common people about psychiatric ailments. They were speaking at a seminar “Mental Health and the Future of Psychiatry”, jointly organised by the Pakistan Psychiatric Society (PPS) and the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) at Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC)the other day. The experts called for training of Pakistani doctors on identification of psychiatric illnesses so that patients with signs and symptoms of various psychiatric ailments could be referred to trained psychiatrists and consultants for timely treatment. Deploring that there were hardly a few hundred trained and qualified psychiatrists in Pakistan, they urged the government for incentives for the profession of psychiatry, create positions of psychiatrists at the district level and appoint them in rural areas to prevent people from committing suicide as well as endangering their and others’ lives. The seminar was addressed by Dr Afzal Javed, president-elect of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), Chairman Sindh Mental Health Authority Karim Khawaja, President of PPS Prof Dr Iqbal Afridi, Dr Raza-ur Rehman and several others, who spoke about prevalence of mental illnesses and various strategies to lower their burden in the society.
