Beginning Steps in School Mental Health in India: A Teacher Workshop

As emphasised by this journal, school mental health (SMH) programmes and services, when done well, lead to valued outcomes for students and systems focused on children and adolescents. However, SMH is nearly non-existent in India. Acute scarcity of trained manpower is the main stumbling block. It is therefore imperative to facilitate the process of SMH with some alternative measures, and one way is to enable the primary stakeholders. Towards this end, at the Central Institute of Psychiatry, Ranchi, India a workshop for teachers was conducted which focused on various aspects of SMH. The effectiveness of the workshop was assessed with the help of pre-post and five-month follow-up assessments which showed increased understanding by teachers of psychological problems in children from participation in the workshop. Admittedly, this is a very early step, but we hope that our experiences will be helpful in moving SMH forward in developing nations.