Bhargavi Davar

An essay in Nature last year, “Grand Challenges to Global Mental Health” (Vol 475, pp 27-30) announced research priorities for improving the lives of people with mental illness around the world, and called for urgent action and investment.

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Teaching Psychiatry with a Gender Perspective

Vol. 40, Issue No. 18, 30 Apr, 2005

Bhargavi Davar

Psychiatry, unlike other medical disciplines, plays the unenviable role of a legal and social arbitrator with respect to the lives and conduct of thousands of mentally ill patients. Education goes some way towards preparing the practitioners to deal not just competently, but justly and equitably with patients. Psychiatrists in India must be enabled to address the contemporary complex social and political dynamics in a fair and humane manner through their medical education. This article reviews currently used textbooks so as to examine the content and structure of medical education in psychiatry.

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Draft National Health Policy 2001 - III : Mental Health: Serious Misconceptions

Vol. 37, Issue No. 01, 05 Jan, 2002

Bhargavi Davar

Policy must certainly be built on people-based principles and practices of 'holistic' health and serious consideration must be given to evolving new perspectives about mental health and the inner life that is beyond the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy. However, a 'holistic' conception of mental health is not about treating mental disorder as another type of public health issue, like kala azar or malaria. While mental health must make linkages with the public health discourse, the differences must be also recognised, articulated and debated.