A detailed seven-page questionnaire prepared for parents and teachers deals with 16 mental diseases. It also includes questions such as “whether a boy behaves like a girl” and “a girl like a boy”, “whether a girl expresses her wish to be a boy and a boy expresses his wish to be a girl”, and “whether a child gets consumed in thoughts of his/her gender most of the times”. The respondents can choose answers ranging from “not true” to “always true”.
The “mental diseases” identified by the government and covered by the module include dyslexia, autism, mental retardation, Down’s syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety, psychogenic pain, depression and enuresis (bedwetting). It also covers slow learning, cognitive delay, speech and language delay, attention deficit disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Once the data is received, the idea is to train teachers to identify these disorders early.
Parents are also required to specify the community they belong to, and the nature of work the father and mother do.
Defending the nature of questions, Dr Hemang Shah, associate professor at department of psychiatry, GMERS Medical College, Ahmedabad, who is associated with the project, said, “Many a time a person feels he or she is trapped in the wrong body, and often goes in for sex change at a later stage in life. Thus, it is better if we identify such cases at an early age and offer them medical and psychiatric support. Other mental traits like depression and anxiety can also be related to such a gender identity disorder.”
