Tele Mental Health Care Services Available In 20 Languages: MoS
The services under Tele-MANAS, government’s tele mental health care service Programme are provided through 130 Mental Health Professionals, 173 District Mental Health Programme personnel and 580 Tele-MANAS Counsellors. A total of 43,861 calls have been received till January 2023 across India under Tele-MANAS.
At present, the Tele-MANAS services are available in 20 languages based on languages opted by states: Hindi, English, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Konkani, Marathi, Gujarati, Assamese, Bengali, Odia, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Bodo, Dogri, Urdu, Manipuri, Mizo and Rajasthani.
The Government has launched a “National Tele Mental Health Programme” on 10th October 2022, to further improve access to quality mental health counselling and care services in the country.
NIMHANS, Bengaluru is the National Apex Centre, coordinated activities of Tele MANAS across India. For the year 2022-23, a total of Rs. 120.98 crore has been allocated for National Tele-Mental Health Programme (NTMHP).
The Government conducted the National Mental Health Survey (NMHS) of India through the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru in 2016, which states that the prevalence of mental disorders in adults over the age of 18 years is about 10.6 per cent. The treatment gap for mental disorder range 70 per cent to 92 per cent for different disorders.
