Islamabad: The Pakistan Medical and Dental Council has ordered annual mental-health screening of 22,500 medical and dental students, along with faculty and staff, to detect psychological distress and suicide risk early, PMDC President Prof Dr Rizwan Taj said on Thursday.
Prof Taj said the initiative was aimed at ensuring that people experiencing emotional distress or other mental-health problems were identified and offered support before their condition worsened or led to self-harm.
He was speaking at the Pakistan Global Mental Health Summit 2026, where Federal Health Minister Syed Mustafa Kamal launched the National Mental Health Policy 2026-2035 amid concerns that millions of Pakistanis requiring mental-health care remain without treatment.
The PMDC president said mental health had also been made an independent and compulsory subject in undergraduate medical and dental education.
He said the council had increased mental-health teaching from 50 to 175 hours and planned to raise it further to 200 hours, as future doctors and dentists needed to be better prepared to recognise and respond to mental-health conditions.
Prof Taj said medical and dental colleges had also been directed to establish primary mental-health care centres to provide support and referral services for students, staff and others requiring assistance.
The measures come as Pakistan’s first nationally representative psychiatric survey found that 32.3 percent of adults, or almost one in every three Pakistanis, were living with a diagnosable mental or behavioural disorder.
The study, published in BMJ Public Health, found that post-traumatic stress disorder affected 19.9 percent of adults, while depressive disorders affected 10.6 percent. Neurotic, stress-related and somatoform disorders were identified in 24.5 percent of respondents.
Researchers interviewed 17,773 adults aged 18 and above in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan between 2019 and 2022, using a structured psychiatric assessment.
The survey also found that 6.2 percent of participants had experienced suicidal thoughts or behaviour during the preceding month, while 1.1 percent reported having attempted suicide at some point in their lives.
Prof Dr Mohammad Iqbal Afridi, professor emeritus of psychiatry and a co-author of the study, said the findings provided the first reliable national picture of mental-health problems in Pakistan.
He said the country had relied for too long on small, localised studies, while the new evidence should guide policymaking, workforce planning and the expansion of community-based services.
The study found a higher burden of mental-health problems among people aged over 40, those who were separated, divorced or widowed, and those who were unemployed, homemakers, students or retired. Mental-health conditions were also associated with difficulties in work, family life and social functioning.
Pakistan has an estimated 500 to 700 qualified psychiatrists, most of whom practise in major cities. An estimated 32.4 million Pakistanis need mental-health care, but the shortage of specialists, combined with stigma, poverty and inadequate services at the primary healthcare level, has left the treatment gap at about 95 percent.
Dr Syed Usman Hamdani, founding director of the Global Institute of Human Development, said mental-health services could be delivered through schools, communities and primary healthcare facilities, but this required sustained investment and implementation.