Delegate: RICHA TRIPATHI
Affiliation: All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Gorakhpur, India
Short Bio: Dr. Richa Tripathi has done her M.D. in Psychiatry and has been extensively involved in the field for last nine years. She holds additional training of three years in Addiction Psychiatry from NDDTC, AIIMS, New Delhi. Presently she is working as an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Gorakhpur, India and is the appointed nodal officer for the Addiction Treatment Facility there. She is a review editor for Frontiers’ public health section and has also been a guest reviewer for the journal SLEEP. Her areas of interest are sleep physiology in various addictive disorders, childhood substance use, substance use in women and dual diagnosis. She has published an extensive review on opioids and sleep. She has presented her research work at various national and international conferences. She was awarded for her research on neurological soft signs at the state conference and also a travel grant from Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India for her research on opioids and sleep. She has also been involved in development of online training program on addiction for medical officers. She was instrumental in the Hindi translation of ASI-Lite.
Activity: The health care center in which I work caters mostly rural population of India and adjoining areas of Nepal. I am a psychiatrist and we see a lot of people with sleep disorders on a daily basis. The department feels that it is very necessary to discuss about sleep problems and increase its awareness in the community.
We are planning following activities-
1.Preparing a banner with theme logo
2.Increasing awareness through mythological stories- As the population is mostly rural and most of them follow Hinduism, discussing and explaining it through mythological stories will have a great impact.
The discussion will start with what is sleep, it’s importance, prevalence of sleep problems worldwide and in India and regarding the theme of World sleep day 2024. The concept of sleep stages will also be explained in terms of Lord Vishnu’s sleep who is sleeping most of the time yet awake to be the nurturer of the mortal world. Some people do have sleep problems but they might ignore it because of stigma. The discussion will then enter into mythology to capture audience’s attention and to make it easily understandable that this problem is not only with you but has been present through centuries.
We will narrate three beautiful stories. The first story is of King Muchkunda who was a great warrior and travelled to the heaven to protect the gods from demons. After the battle was over, he wanted to come back to earth to meet his family but came to know that an entire age has passed there. So, he asked the gods for an undisturbed sleep and anyone who dares to disturb him will be burnt to ashes. The story will be explained in terms of psychiatric disorder and sleep. The second story is from lord Rama’s exile in which laxman was determined not to sleep whole night in order to protect his brother and sister in law. But as it is necessary for every human being on earth to sleep, he was given powers by goddess of sleep for not sleeping and still remaining sane provided someone else should sleep at his place. He opted his wife as his replacement to sleep. The third story is of Kumbhkarana who received a boon from Lord Brahma to sleep for six months at a stretch. Besides hypersomnia, he also had polyphagia and uncontrolled aggression. Scientifically, he seems to be a case of hypothalamic obesity or kleine-levine syndrome. Thus an insight into scientific basis of sleep will be instilled with the help of mythology. A slide show is prepared for the same. The awareness will also include treatment options and the necessity to take treatment. The awareness program will be conducted in the out-patient department, department of Psychiatry, AIIMS, Gorakhpur, India. It will also be conducted in community clinics run by the institute.
Location: Gorakhpur
Date of Activity: 14/03/2024 and 15/03/2024
Submitted by: RICHA TRIPATHI
