Organizations and businesses in Georgia aspire to put mental health on the same map as the rest of the country’s medical field. The Youth Neuroscience Organization and Mental Health Center Psychea held a conference on November 16 and 17, ‘Mental Health in Georgia: Its Presence, Importance, and Challenges’, which brought together more than 10 Georgian professionals in the field.
The Youth Neuroscience Organization was created in 2022 by Founder and CEO Mariam Alavidze. She tells GEORGIA TODAY that what started out as a university club soon turned into an NGO with the goal of integrating psychiatry into the medical field in Georgia. Mental health, which Alavidze says is a large part of medical fields in other countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, is downplayed in Georgia, mainly due to cultural stigma.
Through a multidisciplinary approach, Alavidze looks at different specialties, among them cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology, and endocrinology, to determine how mental health is integrated into each.
“When you have acne or hair loss, you go to a dermatologist, and ‘everything is alright,’” she says. “You think, ‘Okay, my hormones are good, my labs are good, and my vitamins are good. So what’s happening?’ The next part would be therapy, because, physically, there is no root cause, or what we call ‘organic cause.’”
The ‘Mental Health in Georgia: Its Presence, Importance, and Challenges’ conference was held to discuss and present the challenges of psychiatry within the country. Talks focused on legal obstacles, organizational shortcomings, and solutions to the current situation. Alavidze says the conference was originally going to be international, including speakers from other countries, but she realized there had never been a conference solely tailored to Georgia and its regions, and so she opted to keep it local, inviting only Georgian speakers, some of whom came to Georgia from other countries to share their different experiences and perspectives.
Medical Doctor Irakli Mania has his own clinic in the United States, and is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (DFAPA). He gave a presentation about interventional psychiatry and trans-magnetic stimulation (TMS), explaining how it is used in his clinic and elsewhere to treat mental health disorders such as depression. Alavidze describes it as a treatment that sends magnetic waves straight to the brain through a hat-like device to create stimulation, and, after a few sessions, the depression disappears.
Mania shared this solution so local psychiatrists in Georgia could understand the treatment and, hopefully, find a way to implement it within their own clinics.
“We need more specialists and more tools to help these individuals. It is important to stay up-to-date with novel treatment modalities. TMS represents an important breakthrough in the treatment of depression and many other psychiatric disorders,” Mania wrote in a comment for GEORGIA TODAY. “More professionals need to learn about this method, and I hope I managed to spark interest in conference participants to work towards establishing TMS treatments in Georgia.”
Co-founded by MD Irakli Gamkrelidze and Dr. Giorgi Cheishvilli, Psychea is a private mental health center that focuses on a multidisciplinary approach to treatments, consulting, and rehabilitation of mental health services, psychiatry, addiction medicine, and more. Gamkrelidze tells us that the main point of the conference was to share research and evidence-based data from practitioners of many disciplines of medicine, including psychiatry, addiction medicine, psychology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, and environmental health.
Another point was to raise awareness about the mental health system in Georgia, specifically its achievements, the challenges facing the sphere, and the reforms needed to develop it in the right direction.
“One of the main markers of the level of development of a country’s social, medical, and human rights policy is the situation in their mental health system,” says Gamkrelidze. “Unfortunately, nowadays, we are still grappling with the remnants of the past. It’s time to overcome this hurdle.”
According to Mariam Alavidze, specialized doctors in Georgia are doing the psychiatrist’s job in parallel to their own. Rather than referring a patient to a psychiatrist, doctors are prescribing medication themselves, which Alavidze says should be stopped – it is a concept that has been around since the USSR, she notes.
During Soviet times, Alavidze says, people were sent to mental health hospitals as a punishment. The word ‘crazy’ was used for those with mental disorders, which is still a term widely used today with a negative connotation. This has caused a deeply rooted stigma that is still adopted by many people in Georgia.
To combat stigma and normalize mental health discussions, Alavidze offers several recommendations: First, explain mental health disorders in simple terms to make them more understandable. Second, encourage people to embrace mental health conditions, as they can sometimes lead to additional skills, such as multitasking and increased energy. Third, be open and direct about taking medication, making it a topic that is “out in the open.”
Looking ahead, the Youth Neurosurgeon Organization and Psychea are advocating for significant reforms in healthcare across Georgia, especially in remote areas where access to even basic medications, like painkillers, can be difficult. They also aim to reduce stigma and establish mental health care as a recognized and integral part of the medical field, emphasizing that psychiatry plays a crucial role in maintaining overall health.
By Shelbi R. Ankiewicz
