The Department of Psychiatry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Deoghar started to function in January 2021, with its outpatient services from 25th August 2021. It provides quality mental health services through consultations in outpatient (OPD), Inpatient (IPD), Telemedicine, and community services. The faculty and residents of this department cater to a wide range of patients with mental illness like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, OCD, sexual disorders, perinatal mental health problems, childhood neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, Intellectual Disability, Autism, Learning Disability, etc. It also has an Addiction Treatment Facility (ATF), which caters to disorders due to alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, opioids, etc which are managed by trained faculty, residents and other staffs. The department also offers neuromodulation services such as Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), with a plan to start tDCS in the future.
The Department has been training MBBS students since 2021. Psychiatry is a separate undergraduate subject for these students in their 3rd Prof Part-1, wherein they learn the basics and the details of mental illness and their management. It has also started Postgraduate teaching (MD Psychiatry) in 2023, which involves case-based learning, along with learning the nuances of neuromodulation, basic psychotherapy, consultation-liaison psychiatry, addiction medicine, child psychiatry, geriatric psychiatry, and neuropsychiatry through clinical discussions (bedside, grand rounds) and weekly seminars, journal clubs, etc.
Research activities are a priority in this department. All the faculty and residents take an active part in research. As of now the department has obtained funding from WHO, ICMR, MoH&FW, Bloomberg Initiatives (Vital Strategies), MRU-DHR for various research projects, and looks forward for many facets of research in near future. The residents and faculty members have also been working on writing chapters in various textbooks of Psychiatry, both for the undergraduate and the postgraduate students of Psychiatry.
