National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences has now put in place a strategy to pursue its research and therapy in neurodegenerative diseases, besides psycho-neuro patient rehabilitation with the Union government’s XII Plan grant of Rs. 950 crore for the period between 2012 and 2017.

Under the XII Plan allocation, the government has also assigned NIMHANS to continue its efforts under the National Mental Health Programme to ascertain the absolute figure of mental illness for 2014-15.

“We have been approached by the Union government to utilise XII plan allocation to conduct the survey of the mentally ill patients. Although the pilot survey was completed at Kolar district, there was a need to adopt multiple language mode of communication to expand the test across the country. We have now  completed the survey in 300 of the total 600 districts in the country. Now we have to hope validate the findings by mid 2015. India needs to assess the magnitude of such disorders through a selective sample survey”,  Dr P Satishchandra, director and vice chancellor NIMHANS told Pharmabiz.

Another initiative under the XII plan was the setting up of an  Advanced Centre for Translational Research. Its Virtual Department of Clinical Neurosciences is supported by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) with a Rs. 5 crore grant has 23 medical students pursuing Ph.D. The objective of this is to create a research temperament among medical graduates only to promote innovation and encourage translational medicine. Students work in frontier areas of medical research using advanced technology like fMRI, MRI-EEG Co-registration, MEG, multimodal brain imaging analysis, computational neuroscience, molecular genetics, genomics and proteomics and biomarkers in brain tumours with an effort to translate this research to patient care, said Dr. Satishchandra.

The Institute has viewed the importance of community health rehabilitation as critical component in mental healthcare. It restructured the rehabilitation services to offer dedicated psychiatric and neurological rehabilitation services to ensure better integration of patients with their families. It commissioned the Mahabodhi Society Sakalvara community centre in the outskirts of Bengaluru to provide patients pre-work exposure before they are formally approved to report to their office work.

“There is a cottage industry unit with social welfare workers assisting the patients to get back to work. Occupations like candle making and gardening among other soft skill assignments allows patients to expose themselves to a pre-office environment. Many such patients recuperating after a mental trauma or a nervous breakdown need such exposure to ensure that would be able to get back to their normal office work.

“This is where we took on the onus to set up  training camps to accommodate such patients in the 22 cottages which also has residences for nursing staff and doctors monitoring the patients. The rehabilitation phase could span for  around three months and this requires their families to also be them to help them recuperate. We view this as a major achievement to provide patients mental and physical assistance to recover and be ready for work,” informed Dr Satishchandra.