If you expect patients to be chained to the bed or kept in dingy rooms at Nimhans, you could not be more wrong.
Sprawled over 300 acres and thick with greenery, the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (Nimhans) is shedding the ‘hospital’ look by keeping the ward doors open and the team of experts normalising everyday life.
By transitioning from an asylum to an institute of national importance, Nimhans is taking a giant leap in the efforts to destigmatise mental health issues, doctors explained, as they walked people from various walks of life through the campus on Saturday. They called the guided tour ‘stories against stigma’.
Open to public participation, the guided tour took the visitors along the wards, recovery sections, rehabilitation units and de-addiction centre.
“When I wanted to study psychiatry, I was asked not to. People told me that I would be called a ‘mental doctor’,” recollected Dr Santosh Loganathan, additional professor, psychiatry, Nimhans, who took the group around the campus.
As a child, Dr Loganathan had been told to behave well or board bus number 70 from
JB Nagar and Banashankari that would stop at Nimhans.
Institute director Dr B N Gangadhar reminded the need to spread more awareness on mental health. He said there is little or no admission of mental health issues even at the top government offices, where officials rejected Nimhans reports.
“Only patients who had no family members with them, those who can’t manage things by themselves or those who haven’t recovered are inside the locked rooms for their own security,” Dr Gangadhar said.
The group walked past the yoga centre, museum and the psychological rehab centre where patients are given vocational training. The group also visited the café run by those in the Nimhans daycare centre.
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