Glorious History of the Central Zone of Indian Psychiatric Society - Reminiscing the Past

Abstract

It’s been a pleasure and pain to compile the history of the Zone, which will be completing 50 years soon. This task was the brainchild of the current Honorary General Secretary - Dr Ganesh Shanker, and I (Shrikant Srivastava) am still wondering how I got involved in this. However, since I took the responsibility of writing the present monologue, I had to find ways of obtaining factual information. Luckily, the members who were actively involved in the earlier stages of the Zone - such Profs AK Agarwal, RK Mahendru and KC Gurnani, were very helpful in giving narrative accounts of those past days. My modus operandi in this instance, was to contact the senior members and get their reminiscences, which I would note down and later cross reference with other sources. From the information gathered, it became apparent that 1990 onwards, writer records such as letterheads and souvenirs of past conferences were available with the members, who were gracious enough to forward them to me. However, 1970s was enshrouded in mystery and lore, while some factual information was available for the 1980s whereas the data from 1990s is fairly complete with written records such as the list of office bearers published in the journal of the society Needless to say that the following account given of the first two decades is based mainly on anecdotal evidence. Another source of information was an article written by Prof AK Agarwal in the Central Zone journal - Indian Journal of Behavioural Sciences in 2003, celebrating the 25 years of the history. Thus, this is a work in progress, and I will be modifying it as new old information becomes available. There is a spreadsheet containing factual information about the Zone such as office bearers, conference organisers and place for every year, which should be referenced along with this narrative. The spreadsheet can be accessed from the website of the zone (https://cpscentralzone.org).