KARACHI, Aug 27: Speakers at a function on Sunday said that over 16 million people in the country were mentally disturbed while over 1.6 million of them were suffering from emotional, intellectual or social adjustment disorders in the city.

They were speaking at a function organised by the Friends of Pakistan Association for Mental Health (PAMH) they said that every other house in the city had one or more persons taking tranquilizers. They said that major reasons for mental sickness were genetics and stress.

PAMH officials Prof Haroon Ahmad, Dr Ali Wasif, Dr Rubina Kidwai, Dr Rehan Mairajuddin, Syed Nusrat Ali and others also spoke. They said that among them at least 300,000 were those who needed psychiatric / psychological attention and were likely to become a permanent burden on the society if not taken care of.

They said that every fifth home had a psychosomatic / psychiatric problem disturbing family members, neighbourhood or the society, while every tenth house had a psychiatric patient needing medical attention – depression, psychosis, psychosomatic, disorders, obsession, mental retardation, epilepsy and drug dependence.

They said that stress reduced body’s defence mechanism and it caused depression and eventually leading to sickness. They said that mental illness was low priority and high prevalence disease, but owing to psychological barriers patients were hidden from the society.

They said that PAMH was established in 1965 and since then it had been working for the awareness on mental health, public service and general well-being of individuals and the community. Its mission is to provide mental health care irrespective of the patient's capacity to pay, to arrange free mental health camps in the community and to educate the public about various psychiatric disorders, their causes and treatment

They said in December 2002 PAMH started its second free out-patient facility behind Prince Cinema off M. A. Jinnah Road and had been helping mentally ill people to break the chains of despair through psychiatric consultation, medication, psychotherapy and attentive and sympathetic care.

Since 2002, over 40,195 patients have been provided with specialized care, out of them over 27,000 deserving patients have been provided with free medicines.

They said that the future objective of the PAMH was to evolve a community oriented, cost effective and culturally relevant programme for treatment and aftercare of psychiatric patients and to develop a local need based programme in the field of behavioural sciences.

M. Ayub and his theater group staged a few skits to highlight the issues being faced by the families having mentally ill people. Musarat Banu enthralled the audience with her ghazal singing.