NEW DELHI: Mental illness, including schizophrenia, can now be treated just like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases as there are medicines available in the country, said Dr Koushik Sinha Deb, Additional Professor (Psychiatry) at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi.He was speaking at an event on the Convergence of History and Psychiatry at IIC here on Friday, where panelists discussed the intersections of history and psychiatry.Dr Deb said that there was a time in history when leprosy and tuberculosis invited the same kind of stigma as mental illness does.“The stigma was there about the two diseases because not much was known about their treatment. TB patients were also kept in sanatoriums, and leprosy patients were shunned. It was an unknown medical conditions,” he said.“The same is true with mental illness. The basic understanding was less. The understanding of history taught us how the two diseases were feared and how we overcame them,” he added.“Now, people are coming forward to get treated for mental illnesses like anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and other serious mental ailments because there are proper medications for them. We know more about these illnesses now. We don’t fear it, so the stigma is no longer attached. Now, we can treat it just like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases,” he told this paper.
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