Contribution of West Bengal towards Indian Psychiatry: Institutions and Epidemiology

West Bengal is a unique state that has a unique geography and extra-ordinary people. Despite that, the people from Bengal being held in very high esteem for their knowledge, love for their rich culture, leadership qualities; West Bengal has quite high rates of mental illness compared to the Indian average. Psychiatry as a subject developed in West Bengal much earlier and richer compared to the other parts of the country. One of the two pillars of the psychiatry that developed in West Bengal was the development of the mental asylums/hospitals that also gave way to the development of the General Hospital psychiatry under the pioneering leadership of Dr. Girindra Sekhar Bose and his setting up of a psychiatry OPD(first Psychiatry OPD in a GHPU in Asia) at the premises of R. G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in 1933. As time went by, and the institutes and the GHPUs evolved, Bengal saw the development of research, sphere-headed by extra-ordinary psychiatrists in the field of psychiatric epidemiology. Elanger et al (‘71) and Nandi et al (‘74-‘75) were the first groups to publish prevalence studies from West Bengal using questionnaire driven, house to house survey with good methodology. Special and high risk population psychiatric epidemiological studies outnumbered and contributed to the lion’s share of the data presented by the researchers from West Bengal totalling 7 out of the 8 studies published before 2001. Further Prof. D. N. Nandi is hailed to be the only one to be doing follow up prevalence study from India and also incidence studies in psychiatric epidemiology. If one goes into the history of the epidemiological studies from India, no account shall be complete without quoting the studies from West Bengal.