Substance Abuse among the Rural Community of Chhattisgarh, India: Data from a Tele-mentoring Program

Introduction: Substance abuse is a significant problem in India’s rural and urban communities. The prevalence of substance abuse specifically alcohol and tobacco abuse was assessed through this survey. Methodology: The NIMHANS, Bengaluru, has initiated a tele-mentoring program in collaboration with the state government of Chhattisgarh to train the community health officers (CHOs) to identify mental health disorders in the community. The study design was a cross-sectional survey of the data from the records. Training consists of basic 8-didactic sessions, taken over 2 months, each lasting 2 h per week. The session includes lectures and case discussions. At the end of the training, CHOs were trained to apply a screening tool known as “Mental health screening and counselling tool” (MERIT). Over 4 months, 267 patients were found positive for mental health disorders in the MERIT screening (July 2021–October 2021). Results: The result showed that 67 patients were found to be positive for substance abuse. The majority of them were consuming both alcohol and tobacco (43%). The factors identified for substance abuse were problems related to health (53.7%) and family problems (49.3%). Eighty percent of them were not taking any form of treatment for substance abuse. The majority of them had other comorbid psychiatric illnesses, where severe mental disorders (60.4%) were more prevalent than common mental health disorders (30%). Conclusion: The study showed that the prevalence of substance abuse was high in rural communities associated with comorbid mental illness. This is an alarming state to intervene by providing adequate training to community health workers in improving knowledge and skills on substance abuse and its related mental health disorders. Community-led intervention can be further planned to increase awareness of substance abuse and its related mental health disorders.