Prof. Shridhar Sharma
The psychiatrist who helped give Indian mental health a modern voice and a human face

Born on 20 October 1935 in Jaipur, Rajasthan, Shridhar Sharma grew up in a time when psychiatry in India was still emerging from the shadows of colonial asylums and social stigma. He earned his MBBS from Rajasthan University, then became part of the first batch of the Diploma in Psychological Medicine at the Central Institute of Psychiatry, Ranchi, topping his class. In 1965 he completed his MD in Psychiatry. Fellowships followed from the Royal College of Psychiatrists (London), the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, the National Academy of Medical Sciences of India, and Distinguished Fellowship of the American Psychiatric Association.

His career was a steady climb through the institutions that shaped mental healthcare in independent India. He served as Professor of Psychiatry at Medical College, Baroda (1965–68), then as Professor and Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Goa Medical College (1968–81), where he helped establish a new Institute of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour in Panaji. From 1981 to 1986 he was Director and Professor at the Central Institute of Psychiatry, Ranchi—the oldest psychiatric training centre in the country. He went on to become Medical Superintendent of Safdarjung Hospital, New Delhi (the first non-surgeon to hold the post), Director of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh (1990–91), Additional Director General of Health Services in the Ministry of Health (1991–93), and Founder-Director of the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences (IHBAS), Delhi (1993–96).

Between 1989 and 1993 he served as Honorary Physician to the President of India. He was President of the Indian Psychiatric Society (1985–86), President of the Indian Association of Social Psychiatry, and later President (and Chairman of the Board of Trustees) of the World Association of Social Psychiatry. He chaired the Review Committee of the World Psychiatric Association and advocated tirelessly for the human rights of people with mental illness.

In clinics and lecture halls he spoke of the need to move psychiatry out of isolation and into general hospitals, of the importance of psychopharmacology combined with social understanding, and of planning mental-health services that reached ordinary citizens. “The mind is not separate from the life a person lives,” he would tell students and policymakers. “If we treat only the symptom and ignore the social soil in which it grows, we heal only half the patient.”

He received the Dr. B.C. Roy National Award in 1981 for his contribution to the development of psychiatry in India. Today he continues as Emeritus Professor of the National Academy of Medical Sciences and of IHBAS, and as Senior Consultant and Head of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Pushpawati Singhania Research Institute in Delhi.

In a book about Indian doctors, Shridhar Sharma represents the generation that transformed psychiatry from a neglected speciality into a recognised pillar of national health policy. He trained generations of psychiatrists, built institutions, sat at the right hand of the President, and never stopped insisting that mental illness deserves the same dignity, resources and scientific attention as any other disease. A life spent listening carefully—to patients, to colleagues, and to the quiet needs of a nation still learning to speak about the mind.