amid the covid19 lockdown as patients battle the virus mental health experts decided to conduct a sessions focused on the mental wellbeing of patients infected with covid19 these sessions comprised group counselling brief relaxation exercises housie and music therapy providing psychological first aid to inpatients suffering from covid19the department of psychiatry at the rajawadi hospital in ghatkopar east that is caring for patients infected with covid19 along with a group of volunteers recently held group counselling sessions for ward patients psychiatrist parul tank and dr vidya thakur felt there was a need to conduct these sessions for the mental wellbeing of covid19 inpatients parul says we got in touch with captain swaminathan who leads the volunteer group i had zoom meetings and taught the volunteers how to do brief counselling and relaxation exercises and also did some training on empathy parul informs that the recent session not only focused on counselling but also had fun activities like housie and music therapy which was wellreceived captain swaminathan adds we are part of an ngo called vision smart india that has been working in different areas this session was an attempt to bring positivity and to calm the patients who are infected with covid19 theres a lot of fear among these patients and we decided to use counselling as a way to help them cope with it since that was received well we recently conducted a housie and music therapy session where the doctors and inpatients also sang along with our volunteers parsham doshi a guitarist and abhishek mehra a drummer he goes on to share that they sang hum honge kamyab that helped lift the spirits of all presentalong with physical healing emotional healing is equally importantmental health experts feel that such sessions can help calm the inpatients whose mental health needs are not being addressed while this was a first attempt encouraged by the response they have received so far they plan to have more sessions like these for patients admitted here parul also hopes that this model can be replicated in other bmc hospitals caring for covid19 patients