Psycho-social support helpline dealing with 50 cases daily, says LG secretary

The newly launched ‘1093 helpline service’ of the Sindh Local Government Department has been providing counselling service to around 50 people on a daily basis who are suffering from various psychological issues due to the ongoing coronavirus crisis in the country, said Sindh Local Government Secretary Roshan Ali Shaikh on Friday.

“Many any of these psychological problems are related to the fact that people have to spend a lot of time in isolation for their protection against the coronavirus,” he said. Shaikh said the 1093 psycho-social support helpline service had become “the best source of counselling services to people from across the country suffering from depression and other psychological ailments due to the coronavirus emergency”.

The LG secretary said the time being spent in isolation by the COVID-19 patients had become the major source of different psychological problems.

He said the free counselling service had been “highly helpful in providing the much-needed emotional support for the patients of COVID-19 in isolation so to make them psychologically stable in order to provide them with the opportunity to resume the normal life”.

He said the panel of expert psychologists and volunteers available to the helpline service had been providing their counselling services seven days a week. “The counselling sessions being conducted by these psychologists have been producing very encouraging results.”

In this regard, he added, a special online counselling session was recently conducted for the field isolation facility at the Expo Centre Karachi as the doctors and paramedics of the facility also took part in the session.

“The counselling session conducted through the method of tele-conferencing was highly beneficial for the psychological support of the patients admitted to the Expo Centre’s isolation facility. The patients were given counselling so to enable them to lead a healthy and pleasant life once they recovered from the disease and released from the isolation facility,” he said.

The LG secretary appreciated the services of the volunteers associated with the helpline service as “their support has been helpful in the government’s aggressive campaign against the viral epidemic”.