For a Beautiful Mind

Some psychologists are putting in extra time to extend counselling services to the less-privileged children

PICTURE SPEAK

HEALING TOUCH: A Mon Foundation doctor conducts a psychology test

It all started 15 years ago, when doctors Debashis Chatterjee, Gautam Ghosh, Jyotirmay Samajdar, Anindya Chatterjee, Satyajit Ash, Aniruddha Deb, and psychologists Sutapa Basu and Zena Deb, used to meet regularly at a small office to discuss the problems afflicting children. “We were not really active then,” says Chatterjee, the Foundation’s secretary, adding, “We were a small outfit and all our members were busy practising.” As a result, touring schools and taking up causes actively was quite a task. However, the doctors wanted to effect a change in the way such kids were treated.

Often, parents and teachers are either unaware of children’s mental troubles or do not know how to help them. Hence, the group conducted a survey of eight schools in the city catering to the lower middle class in 1998 with a sample size of 843. The survey showed that about 23.8 per cent of those schoolchildren suffered from various psycho-social problems and mental disorders. The need for full-time personnel and teachers to attend to the problems of such children was, thus, realised. Funded by cry, the foundation started organising workshops for schoolteachers to help them identify such problem children, involve parents and decide whether those children should be referred for treatment.

With a strength of 12 member-doctors, Mon Foundation is making a difference to many schools under the West Bengal primary education board. So far, it has directly trained around 40 teachers and 80 community workers, who, in turn, have trained many others. The organisation is now extending its activities to a number of districts in the state, and even to Orissa.

The foundation also publishes books on mental health and depression that offer guidelines on how to identify problems and deal with troubled children. It also brings out newsletters in which teachers, students and parents write about their experiences. By taking up life skills education—a set of who-approved guidelines that define them as behaviours that enable individuals to effectively deal with the challenges of life—the group is helping build a mentally healthier future.

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