On the occasion of World Mental Health Day, the state government today announced its draft State Mental Health and Social Care Policy.
This aims to promote overall mental health and well-being and facilitate appropriate access and care pathways for common and severe mental health concerns.
The draft policy can be viewed by the general public via https://meghealth.gov.in/documents.html and http://nhmmeghalaya.nic.in/programmes/NMHP/nmhp.html for a period of 15 days.
The draft mental health policy is a result of extensive research, situational analysis in the context of Meghalaya and focused group discussions conducted by key stakeholders involved in the drafting process, an official press release stated today. The draft policy has been put up in the public domain for the information of all, and also to find some key missing elements, if any, within the policy document. Members of the public can send in their comments to healthdeptt502@gmail.com. These suggestions will then be reviewed before the formal launch of the final Mental Health and Social Care Policy.
Health and Family Welfare Minister James PK Sangma, while formally announcing the draft policy, said that universal access to mental health care is an important goal of the state government, and added that Meghalaya has achieved a major milestone in the health sector through the announcement of this draft policy. He also informed that Meghalaya is the first state in the North East to come out with its own mental health policy.
“The issue of mental health has remained a taboo subject and continues to be widely neglected due to the stigma associated with it. And in the past three years, owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, mental health gradually emerged as a silent pandemic that lurked upon each one of us and manifested itself in various forms. This led to urgency for having a dedicated policy to address the issues pertaining to mental health,” Sangma said.
The minister informed that the core committee and sub-committee were formed in order to guide the process of drafting the policy to make it suited to tackle the issues that exist within our state.
‘’We partnered with several stakeholders and under the state capability enhancement framework, through a problem driven iterative adaptive (PDIA) approach. We involved all the concerned departments and agencies as part of our collaborative proposition towards problem identification and solving,’’ he said.
Principal Secretary Sampath Kumar explained that the main objective is to provide universal access to mental healthcare by enhancing understanding of mental health and strengthening leadership in the mental health domain at all levels.
He added that the policy is a holistic approach that aims to not only provide care, but also address the socio-economic determinants affecting the mental health space, while creating enabling conditions to address and prevent challenges pertaining to mental health within the state.
To address the stigma associated with mental health, the intent is to build awareness and leadership at the community level through the involvement of the Village Health Councils (VHCs) as well as through all the 460 health sub-centres across the state, as they can be the first point for screening and identifying the issues of public health.
