KUALA PILAH HISTORY 4 - The War years part 2: March 2017

MALAYSIAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION

MPA, 40 YEARS AND COUNTING
On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of MPA's Founding on 19 March 1977

Malaysian Psychiatric Association -THE EARLY YEARS

Introduction - from MPA website original written by MPDeva

It was not an easy beginning for the MPA. It was not that the first meeting called by Dr. M P Deva of the Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Malaya to discuss the formation of the Malaysian Psychiatric Association in November 1976 was not well attended at the Hospital Kuala Lumpur. In fact it was just the opposite, it attracted 17 psychiatrists out of the approximately 25 in the country, and other staff. It was a trying time for psychiatry in Malaysia with about a dozen psychiatrists out of perhaps 25 leaving or planning to leave for greener pastures down under. The mental hospitals were overflowing with well over 8000 patients in conditions that would have been unthinkable today. The Hospital Bahagia had pioneered in 1970s a Day Care in Ipoh where the institutionalized mentally ill were bussed several times a week to an empty private home for and outing, games a sample of life outside the mental hospital. The 2 year Masters in Psychological Medicine programme of University of Malaya which started in 1973, graduated its second batch of one psychiatrist, and was facing a bleak drought of new trainees. But perhaps the bigger immediate threat was from among a few of the profession and many in one other specialty who felt that the MPA as a concept was not a wise one, as there was already a Neuro-psychiatric society of the Malaysian Medical Association. Luckily the majority of the psychiatrists prevailed and the MPA was formally inaugurated by the Honourable Minister of Health Tan Sri Lee Siok Yew on 19th March 1977 at Hospital Bahagia, Ulu Kinta. Dato Seri M. Mahadevan was elected as the MPA's First protem President with Dr. M P Deva as protem Hon Gen Secretary. The election was followed by a scientific session on The Move to Community Psychiatry in Malaysia.

The Hospital Bahagia Ulu Kinta Quadrangle where MPA was

launched by Hon Minister of Health Malaysia

Tan Sri Lee Siok Yew on 17 March 1977

From humble beginnings First MPA President Tan Sri M Mahadevan at MPA Scientific meeting
Hospital KL T.A.R. Neuro Psychiatric Institute Lecture theatre in late 1970s

The Malaysian Psychiatric Association was formed in 1977 to fulfil a strongly desired need to improve the sad state pf psychiatry in Malaysia then stigmatised poorly developed and very poorly staffed by qualified psychiatrists.The psychiatric patient was treated in the large forbidding and overcrowded mental hospitals or in cells in district hospitals in ways unbecoming of the needs for humane care all solemnly declared but only a few did practice, Then as now in the 21st Century, stigma of mental illness was blamed on the public while the custodians did little to improve the lot of the mentally ill. Administrative and budgetary reasons over rode the inhumanity of care.By 1975 the first 3 of home grown psychiatrists with the 2 year Masters degree in Psychological Medicine from University of Malaya had graduated and psychotropic medicines were widely available. However the pyramidal structure of care that sent patients from smaller towns to Emergency Treatment Units and Mental Health Units and Regional Mental Health Units (ETU, MHU and RMHU) and finally to the Mental Hospitals did little to improve the quality of care as diagnoses, doses of medicines and rehabilitation needed much improvement. The MPA aimed to bring together most of the 25 psychiatrists in Malaysia then with a population of about 16 million, to discuss ways to improve training and thereby services that often resembled those in the pictures that follow.

ETU

MHU

As UKM and UM had the only Departments of psychiatry in the local oniversity and HKL had a large general Hospital Psychiatric Unit in the TAR Institute of Neuro Sciences the 3 departments started holding regular psychiatric meetings to discuss common problems in psychiatric practice, host lectures by visiting psychiatrists and external examiners at the Nurses Lecture hall of HKL and the mini lecture theatre of the TAR Institute.

In 1983 6 years after MPA was formed the ASEAN Federation for Psychiatry and Mental Health that was formed in 1981 in Bangkok under its Founding President Professor R Kusumanto Setyenegoro of Indonesia (also after 10 years in the making) requested MPA to host the 4th ASEAN FORUM ON CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRY.

This was then the only ASEAN wide conference in psychiatry and it was only in 1983 that the present Cycle of ASEAN Congresses in Psychiatry started (currently in its 16th Session)

MPA despite it having only 2 child and Adolescent Psychiatrists and limited funds took up the challenge and held a successful meeting in IMR, in KL..

The first publication of MPA 1983

The MPA continued its scientific meetings in turn in UMMC and UKM and HKL especially as more overseas speakers as examiners were coming to KL at the start of UKM's postgraduate Psychiatry training but no national Malaysian Scientific conference was organised . In 1988 Assoc Professor M P Deva from University of Malaya organised the First Malaysian Conference on Psychological Medicine - thus began the current series of the biennial and now annual MCPM under MPA - currently in its 20th session. The First MCPM was held in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya in KL.