Serious uncertainties at economical, societal and individual level due to Coronavirus pandemic have caused mental stress and agony to different extent among many people. Considering this phenomenon, counselling of Covid19 patients in Tripura has started to combat the mental stress related issues.
With no ending of Covid menace in sight, often such stress is resulting in psychological trauma and often pushing the people to commit suicide – there were reports of at least two suicides in Tripura (one is yet to be confirmed officially) that related to Covid scare.
In most of the case a sense of let down and worries for losing jobs, fall of business, and long days in quarantine confinement took heavy toll on many Covid infected individuals—and even if they got cured after some days- they found it difficult to cope with the situations. In cases, unsympathetic behaviours of the neighbours and even relatives also added to the mental agony and pains.
The National Mental Health Mission had taken this emerging problem into consideration and as part of its guidelines, counselling of Covid 19 patients have also started in Tripura also in order to instill confidence among the patients who are already battling the deadly contagion.
The trained counsellors keep a track with the surveillance officers engaged at many parts of the state and get details of the patients. After having the details, the counsellors talk through tele-psychiatric-counselling method.
“We are in communication with all surveillance officers of all districts who are providing names and contact numbers of covid positive patients. Our counsellors (10 in number) get in touch with them and speak whether anything is haunting them or not. If there are no issues they at least convince them not to panic due to the covid 19 situations and recovery is just a matter of 10 to 15 days”, said Udayan Majumder, in charge of national health mission Tripura.
If any problem is there, he said, the patients undergo counselling in the prescribed ways and the issues get resolved.
“We are getting good responses from many patientsIt is a project we have started under the National Mental health programme under NMH Tripura”, Majumder told this newsman.
As per the details, everyday 40 to 50 patients were counselled everyday and the cumulative figure had already crossed 1,000 mark.
