With the rise in the number of people returning from abroad and other States, the Department of Health has scaled up its psychosocial support team for reaching out to people in quarantine.
Previously, the mental health programme in all districts combined accounted for about 200 with a psychiatrist as nodal officer, a clinical psychologist, a psychiatric social worker and a slew of social workers making up the team in every district.
Number soaring
With the number of quarantined people soaring, that number has since crossed 1,000 with the Health Department training and deploying volunteers and counsellors from other programmes like Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) and Integrated Counselling and Testing Centre (ICTC) and National Health Missionary.
“We have so far made one-time reassurance calls to over 2.50 lakh quarantined people and over 1.91 lakh follow-up calls to people who were found to be in need of extended psychological support,” said Kiran P.S., State Nodal Officer, Mental Health Programme.
The frequency of follow-up depends on the condition of the quarantined and the severity of their issue. For instance, if the person concerned faces suicidal tendencies then the follow-up is done on a daily basis and if the problem is moderate to minor then the follow-up happens once in three and five days respectively.
Dr. Kiran said that the pattern of the problems faced by quarantined people had evolved over the time since the pandemic outbreak.
“Initially, it was about stigma when the returnees were mostly from Wuhan in China and there was little awareness about the illness. But ever since the pandemic spread across the globe and highly developed European countries like Italy and Spain and the U.S. started reporting large number of deaths, stigma has been replaced by anxiety,” he said.
In focus
Pregnant women and immediate family members of people who die owing to the pandemic are among the people who are in focus.
“Often family members of the deceased are put in quarantine after having just a glimpse of the body and they are the ones who need the biggest psychological support whereas the pregnant remain highly anxious about the well being of their babies,” said Soumya Raj, nodal officer, Ernakulam District Mental Health Programme.
Meanwhile, the Health Department has further extended its targeted psychosocial support services initially meant for vulnerable sections during the lockdown.
The service is mainly aimed at people with mental illness, children with special needs, migrant workers, elderly people living alone etc.
