Sri Lanka has only about 100 to 120 psychiatrists serving the entire country, and the migration of specialists abroad has become a major cause of the shortfall, Consultant Psychiatrist at the National Hospital of Sri Lanka Professor Chathurie Suraweera said at a media briefing at the Health Promotion Bureau, the Daily Mirror reported at 11.12 a.m. on Tuesday.

The figure of 100 to 120 includes consultant psychiatrists and professionals in other categories, she said — it is not a count of consultants alone. The number currently serving is insufficient to meet growing demand for mental health services.

Why they leave

Professor Suraweera identified the destination countries and the reason specialists are recruited away.

“Sri Lankan psychiatrists have job opportunities in Australia and the United Kingdom at any given time, and the training they receive here is highly valued. Therefore, this issue continues to arise.”

The point she makes is that the training is the asset. Specialists are not leaving because their qualifications are marginal abroad but because locally-trained psychiatrists are in demand in two high-income health systems at all times.

This is a specialist instance of a pattern the data already shows at scale. Census figures cited by the UNFPA record 672,249 Sri Lankans living abroad temporarily, 86 percent of them for employment — and the analyst who presented them argued the aim should be to make migration a choice rather than to try to stop the brain drain.

What the workload looks like against that number

Professor Suraweera gave one measure of demand at her own institution:

“When we conduct a morning clinic, around 150 patients come for treatment.”

Clinics at both the National Hospital and the National Institute of Mental Health continue to receive large numbers of patients, she said.

Our own reporting from five days earlier puts a figure on the second of those. At a briefing ahead of World Mental Health Day, NIMH officials said the institute treats more than 1,000 patients daily and admits around 60 new patients each day, and had trained nearly 20,000 people over the previous year.

Set against a national specialist pool of 100 to 120, a single institution’s daily caseload of more than 1,000 patients is roughly ten times the entire country’s psychiatrist headcount — and NIMH’s 60 daily admissions are about half that headcount again, every day.

Two cautions on that arithmetic. The 150-patient morning clinic is at the National Hospital and the 1,000-a-day figure is at NIMH; these are different institutions and the figures must not be added. And patient numbers are not handled by psychiatrists alone — medical officers, nurses and other mental health staff carry much of the clinical load, so the ratio describes the scale of demand relative to specialist supply, not a per-doctor caseload.

Her clinical point: people may not notice it in themselves

Professor Suraweera used the briefing to make two points aimed at the public rather than at policy. The first was that mental illness is not someone else’s problem.

“Anyone, from a young child to an elderly person, can develop a mental illness. We should not think that this cannot happen to me and that it will happen to someone else.”

The second was about why people delay seeking help.

“In mental illnesses, it is often our thoughts that change, and we may not realise that our thoughts have changed. However, although the person may not recognise it, others around them may notice the changes.”

She encouraged people experiencing difficulties to seek professional medical attention. NIMH operates a 24-hour helpline on 1926, according to the earlier briefing.

The timing

This briefing falls three days after World Mental Health Day, which was marked on 10 October under the theme “Listening to Lived Experiences: Real Voices, Real Change.” The 8 October NIMH briefing described the services being expanded — training programmes for prison and health staff, adolescent work on substance abuse and screen use. This one describes the constraint those services operate under. Neither briefing refers to the other, and the sequence is set out here as that: a sequence, not a response.

Not reported

The filing does not say how many of the 100 to 120 are consultants as against other categories, how many posts are vacant, or how many psychiatrists have left in any given period — so the rate of loss is not on the record, only its direction. It gives no figure for how many psychiatrists the country is assessed to need, no national patient or diagnosis totals, and no district breakdown, which matters because specialist shortages are rarely distributed evenly between Colombo and the rest of the island.

It carries no response from the Health Ministry on recruitment, training places or retention, and does not say whether the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine is expanding psychiatry training. Professor Suraweera is reported identifying the cause but is not reported proposing a remedy. No other verified newsroom had filed on this briefing at the time of writing.