Abstract

A large crowd throngs the out-patient hall and all 300 children cry in unison. The father of an eight year-old girl pushes her through the crowd until she reaches a partitioned cubicle where four doctors sit round a table. He puts her in front of the first doctor and tells him about the chest pain she has had for months. The doctor, struggling to hear above the din, takes a brief history and examines the girl standing up. The history is inconclusive and there are no signs; he cannot understand why her parents have bothered to make the 30 mile bus ride that morning; why didn't they accept the advice of the paediatricians they had consulted nearer their home? Usually he would have written a prescription for a tonic costing the father two days' wages, but this time he directs the girl and her father back through the crowd to where I sit, alone in my cubicle, separated from the gaze of the attenders by a saloon bar door.

Highlights

  • I invite father and daughter to sit down

  • After six years of psychiatric training in Britain we returned to my home town in Kerala, South India

  • India is bursting at the seams with children

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Summary

Introduction

I invite father and daughter to sit down. They come from an interior village that I have often passed through, consisting of 50 or so huts, two shops and, by far the biggest building, a mosque. Is there no provision for psychologically disturbed children, there is no undergraduate or postgraduate teaching in child psychiatry. Our aim on this journey home was to find the first bricks of information needed to build a service that could provide psychiatric care for these children. We had to find samples of normal, conduct disordered and emotionally disturbed children.

Results
Conclusion

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