In Kashmir, the first Psychiatric facility for the people began with the construction of an asylum by the Prisons department in 1903 in the backyard of the central jail in Srinagar. It had the provision of keeping a few individuals in a few barracks. Subsequently, the hospital, still housed in barracks of the Central Jail, was delinked from prisons and established as a mental health facility under the Directorate of Health Services. Over the years it was transformed into a 100-bedded Psychiatric Disease Hospital and attached to Government Medical College, Srinagar, initially as its undergraduate and subsequently as a postgraduate teaching department. Till the late 1960s, the hospital was rendering services to severely disturbed or mentally deranged individuals mainly as a custodial care institution without OPD services.

In the 1970s, it was the Swiss lady psychiatrist Prof Erina Hoch who worked here as the first Professor and Head of the undergraduate department of psychiatry in GMC, Srinagar, and significantly contributed to creating awareness among the people about mental disorders and their management. Prof KS Dutta succeeded her and his small team opened the Post Graduate Training Department of Psychiatry in 1983. During the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, the late Prof Abdul Ahad Beg made an outstanding contribution to Kashmir’s clinical psychiatry and got it a decent place like other branches of medicine.

This marked the beginning of people coming openly for psychiatric treatment to the Hospital. His sad demise in 1996 coincided with the beginning of new challenges to psychiatry. Department of Psychiatry-Government Medical College Srinagar operates two hospitals; Government Psychiatric Diseases Hospital at Kathidarwaza, Srinagar- a 100-bed hospital and Community General Hospital Unit SMHS-Srinagar with an admission facility of 40 patients. The department provides inpatient and outpatient drug de-addiction services at Government Psychiatric Diseases Hospital (Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-sciences Kashmir) and at the Community Center Services at SMHS Hospital Srinagar. In addition to the de-addiction services, the Community General Hospital Unit provides consultation and liaison psychiatry services to associated hospitals of GMC Srinagar. The department also operates specialized clinics such as the Child Guidance and Wellbeing Center and Geriatric Clinic running at this center. The department has 8 MCI-recognized MD Psychiatry seats and 8 M.Phil. Clinical Psychology seats annually.

Besides that, the department also trains students pursuing B.sc and M.sc Nursing, Master in Social Work (MSW), and Masters in Psychology from various institutes of the country. Around 95,000 patients were seen at IMHANS at Kathidarwaza and Community General Hospital Unit from March 2018 to March 2019.