CM Naveen vows mental healthcare for all as Covid wreaks havoc

BHUBANESWAR: Ramani Ranjan Mohapatra, a 35-year-old IT professional, is a patient at the mental health clinic for the last couple of months. He has complaints of sleeplessness while working from home, fear of losing his job and long screen time been making him sick.
“I feel tired but cannot sleep. Lost interest in everything and nothing excites me. Doing work from home without going out and the news of lay-off also disturbs me,” said Mohapatra.
Complaints of insomnia and anxiety are on the rise among people during the lockdown, said psychiatrists. The outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic has not only caused threat of the highly infectious disease but also affected mental health. On world mental health day on Saturday chief minister Naveen Patnaik asked people to pledge to ensure quality mental health care is accessible to those who are vulnerable.
“As the world grapples with the biggest health emergency of our time due to Covid-19 pandemic, it has brought sharp focus on mental health and wellbeing. On World Mental Health Day, pledge to ensure that quality mental health care is accessible to those who are vulnerable,” Naveen twitted.
The theme of this year’s World Mental Health Day was ‘Mental Health for All: Greater Investment—Greater access’. This theme was chosen by the World Federation for Mental Health as the whole world is facing the challenge of mental health problems due to the outbreak of corona pandemic.
“Apart from anxiety and insomnia we are getting different psychological issues among different age groups. Younger generation face breakup issues leading to irritability, frustration that lead to depression, and excessive use of alcohol, smoking, weed and all middle age-job or business loss lead to sexual issues, addiction and finally end in severe depression. Work pressure among women has been maximum as people start staying at home for a prolonged periods lead to exacerbation of previous disease which were under controlled before with medication like mania, depression, schizophrenia and all,” said Subhendu Narayan Mishra, professor in psychology at IMS and SUM Hospital here.
Doctors said, elderly persons are feeling insecure, panic, restless, lack of sleep issues as they usually watch rising covid cases on TV and feel more vulnerable to covid infections. “Overall I see huge rise in depression and addiction cases among all age groups along with sleep and anxiety,” Mishra added.
Additional professor in psychiatrist at AIIMS-Bhubaneswar Dr SK Padhy cited a survey and said, the covid-19 outbreak and subsequent lockdown has led to poor sleep quality, shift in sleep cycle to delayed phase, sleep-deprivation based on night time sleep and depressive symptoms in a sizable number of population.
“A shift to later bedtime, delayed sleep onset, reduction in night time sleep duration and increased daytime napping has been observed. A significant number of participants reported worsening sleep quality. Apart from insomnia, anxiety and the depressive symptom was higher than population estimates,” he added.
Inspired By