Mental Health Camp- A Report

Mental health camps serve the purpose of enhancing people’s awareness about mental health and offer to amend related fallacy and stigma and wrong attitude towards mental illness and people with mental illness. Mental health camps offer a potential to local community to receive affordable help and utilise the available resources to identify, counsel or refer people with mental health issues or in crises situations to community agencies for providing mental health care services. Material and Methods: A one day free mental health screening, referral and counselling camp was organized on November 20, 2019 in Jamia Hamdard (deemed to be university), Delhi, premises for students and staff. The camp was conducted with due permission from Registrar with a prior notice to the security officer. Standardized inventories for anxiety, depression and stress were administered. After interpretation of scores, those in need of counselling were given one to one counselling, and further referrals, if required, were done by the mental health professionals. A total of 525 students and staff walked in the camp and 86 students were given spot counselling and referral as required. The results from inventories were later analysed and reported. Result: The analysis of inventories showed that more than 50% respondents had 50% probability of developing major stress induced health problems in the near future. More than 2/3rd participants had moderate level of stress. The camp helped in dispelling the stigma associated with talking about one’s mental health and consolidated the belief that it is okay to talk about one’s mental health.