President Dr Arif Alvi has called for focusing on mental health by chalking out an effective implementable plan to help address the issue of mental health. In order to ensure the availability of mental health care in the country, he emphasized the need to establish telehealth centres to provide advice to the people about mental health problems. The President made these remarks at a presentation, given by Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Ms. Andleeb Abbas, who is heading a Task Force on Mental Health, at Aiwan-e-Sadr, today. The meeting was also attended by Prof Dr Rizwan Taj, Prof Dr Mowadaat Hussain Rana, Ms Cristina Von Sperling Afridi, other members of the Task Force and senior officials of the Government of Pakistan. Addressing the meeting, the President said that the importance of mental health had been ignored in the past and it needed to be given special attention so as to overcome the mental health challenge. He urged the need to devise a multi-pronged strategy by involving psychologists, media and teachers to guide the people and students about the issues related to mental health. The meeting proposed to train the teachers by the psychologists to sensitize the students with regard to mental health care. The meeting emphasized the need to train more human resource and provide specialized services to address the growing challenge of mental health. It was emphasized to create awareness among people about issues related to mental health through media.
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