Establishing an Interventional Psychiatry Service in a Public Tertiary-care Teaching Hospital in India: Experience from the Center for Neuromodulation and Interventional Psychiatry
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Newer DevelopmeNtin the Indian clinical context.[3][4][5] However, guidelines are intended to guide rather than replace clinical judgment and require adaptation to the infrastructure, workforce, patient population, and operational circumstances of individual treatment settings.Despite the increasing availability of these interventions, there is limited published literature describing the practical process of establishing and running an integrated interventional psychiatry service, particularly within publicly funded, multispecialty, tertiary-care teaching hospitals in India.Establishing such a service involves challenges beyond the acquisition of treatment devices.These include identification and development of appropriate physical infrastructure, procurement of essential equipment and IntroductIonInterventional psychiatry is a relatively new and evolving psychiatric subspecialty that applies advances in clinical neuroscience and technology to the procedural treatment of psychiatric disorders.Although conventional psychiatric treatment has traditionally relied primarily on pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy, increasing understanding of the neural circuits underlying psychiatric symptoms has contributed to the development and clinical application of interventions that directly or indirectly modulate brain activity.Interventional psychiatry has therefore emerged at the interface of psychiatry, neuroscience, neurotechnology, and procedural medicine.The scope of interventional psychiatry continues to evolve.Brain stimulation techniques constitute a central component and include electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), theta-burst stimulation, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and, in selected settings, invasive neuromodulation techniques.The broader scope of interventional psychiatry may also include newer psychopharmacological interventions such as ketamine, psychedelic-assisted interventions, and other technology-enabled treatments. 1 A recent Indian perspective proposed a broad definition of interventional psychiatry as procedural treatments in psychiatry that use advances in clinical neuroscience and technology, including brain stimulation, psychopharmacological interventions, psychedelic therapeutics, assisted psychotherapies, and digital therapeutics.2 Several interventions commonly considered within the scope of interventional psychiatry have accumulated an expanding evidence base and are increasingly being incorporated into routine psychiatric practice.The Indian Psychiatric Society (IPS) has published clinical practice guidelines addressing ECT, rTMS, and tDCS, providing an important framework for their implementation 1-
Source: Delhi Psychiatry Journal
Language: English
Subfield: Neurology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7223704274