According to Dr CL Pradhan, a renowned psychiatrist at the STNM Hospital in Gangtok, the state level drive has fixed a target group encompassing the youths belonging to 20 to 40 years of age. “People belonging to this age group are most vulnerable as far as the drug addiction is concerned. A kind of collective restlessness at the mental level seems to be afflicting the society and this is culminating in mounting number of the cases of psychosomatic ailments. And, stretched to the extreme, this illness is driving the addicts to commit suicide. This is an alarming phenomenon for the society and we must fight it out collectively,” Dr Pradhan said. He further said that the physicians manning the primary health centers were being given training to enable them to start the treatment in such cases. “Compounding our problem is the common people’s aversion towards the psychiatrists, mental health and de-addiction centers. They are reluctant to be labeled as mental cases. We must try to remove this psychological block at the popular level in course of a relentless awareness campaign throughout the state,” he said.
He counseled for proper parental care and congenial domestic ambience to keep the adolescents from the allurement of drug taking.
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Source: The Statesman
