Professor Ajita Chakraborty MB, DPM, FRCP (Ed.) FRCPsych: Formerly Director of Postgraduate Medical and Research Institute, Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, Calcutta, India

摘要

Ajita Chakraborty, who has recently died aged 88, pioneered the advancement of women in the field of psychiatry in India where she was the first woman to practise in the specialty. She was highly active in the Indian Psychiatric Society in which she served as general secretary (1967-1968), treasurer (1971-1974), vice president (1975) and finally, as a tribute to her indomitable leadership qualities and organisational skills, as president in 1976. Ajita had a keen interest in transcultural psychiatry. She first carried out pioneering epidemiological studies (with an impressive sample size of 13 335) around Calcutta exploring sociological and cultural perspectives. She noted that visual hallucinations (visions of gods and goddess) were common, particularly in women. This made making a differentiation between ‘pseudo’ and true hallucinations a challenge.1 She also studied the outbreak of Koro in eastern parts of India and proposed a hypothesis linking this disorder with displacement as well as loss of agricultural land and threats to cultural identity among the farming population.2 For several years she worked on evolving an indigenous school of psychotherapy that was well adapted for the people she treated most of her life. She was a member of the World Psychiatric Association, Transcultural Psychiatry Section, for 25 years. On her retirement from the editorial board of the journal Transcultural Psychiatry, the editor, Lawrence Kirmayer, thanked her for ‘unique and invaluable contributions’ to the journal over the years.