The Chief Minister will begin a three-day tour in the Kadapa district on Thursday to launch development projects and give speeches at public forums, among other things. The Institute of Mental Health in Kadapa is scheduled to open on Saturday, according to the chief minister. Up till today, the State only has one such facility, located in Visakhapatnam. In order to offer the residents of Rayalaseema and the coastal regions high-quality mental health treatments, the government moved to establish the Institute of Mental Health on the grounds of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) in Kadapa.
In the past, patients in the area needed to travel to Hyderabad, Tirupati, Kurnool, and Nellore in order to receive better medical care. The mental health facility will allocate its 100 beds in the following manner: 30 beds for de-addiction, 4 beds for each of the male and female wards, 10 beds for casualty, and 20 beds for jail wards. The State government has employed six assistant doctors, one superintendent, one psychologist, three senior resident doctors, and five post-graduates to work at the Institute. “There is only one mental health hospital in Visakhapatnam,” stated the superintendent doctor. In the past, receiving medical care required patients with mental health concerns to travel almost 700 kilometers. Patients from coastal areas and Rayalaseema can now access Kadapa healthcare.
Facilities In Mental Health Institute
The former Chief Minister’s administration established RIMS, which now operates with 750 beds. The hospital also established connections with colleges of medicine and dentistry. It treats 250–300 inpatients and attends to 1,500–1,800 outpatients daily. The RIMS campus now houses the Mental Health Institute, Multi-Speciality Hospital, and Cancer Care Center, offering the general public access to improved and state-of-the-art medical treatment facilities. The construction of the four-story, multi-specialty block, spanning 2.38 lakh square feet and accommodating 452 beds, occurred with an estimated cost of Rs 125 crore.
Cardiothoracic and vascular surgery, neurosurgery, surgical gastroenterology, urology, plastic surgery, and pediatric surgery are all within the Surgical Super-Specialities wing of the hospital, which will also offer services for neurology, cardiology, medical gastroenterology, nephrology, and neurology. The super-specialty block includes 12 advanced modular operation theaters, a blood bank, CT and MRI scan centers, a radiology department, a Central Sterile Services Department (CSSD), a central pharmacy, 11 units of high-definition intensive care units with a 152-bed capacity, and a central laboratory suitable for all super-specialties.
Need for the Mental health facility
As per the first comprehensive figures of the burden of diseases attributable to mental health, from 1990 released by the India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative and issued in the Lancet Psychiatry, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh represent a greater percentage of mental disorders which manifest primarily through adulthood in depression and anxiety. According to the report, 197 million Indians, or over one in seven of the country’s population, experienced mental health issues of various degrees in 2017. These comprise autism, behavioral disorders, idiopathic developmental intellectual disability, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety disorders, and autism.
Andhra Pradesh is home to about 1.45 lakh homeless people, making it the state with the fifth-largest homeless population in India. Although the severe situation is highlighted by data from the 2011 Census, experts believe that during the past ten years, the number of homeless people has increased, with an estimated 50–60% of them experiencing mental health concerns. Regretfully, because the state does not fully adhere to the criteria established in India’s Mental Healthcare Act of 2017, it finds it difficult to provide these vulnerable persons with sufficient mental health care.
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