The Central Institute of Psychiatry came into existence in the year 1918 by the British Administration. Then this institute was known as “Ranchi European Mental Asylum”. After the independence this institute was taken over by the Government of India and being renamed as “Hospital for Mental Diseases”. Finally on April 1, 1977 this hospital had been upgraded as the institute and renamed as “Central Institute of Psychiatry. The department of psychiatric social work came into existence in the decade of 1950s. But training of the students and professionals who were aspiring to be trained ‘psychiatric social worker’ started in the year 1970. Since then various achievements have been attained by this department. Training of psychiatric social work started as the “Diploma in Psychiatric Social Work (DPSW)” firstly and in the year 1985 it was upgraded into M.Phil. Course.  Presently 8 seats each available for first and second year M. Phil trainees. Annual intakes of trainees are 8 presently.

Functions and activities performed by the Department of Psychiatric Social Work:

• Providing rehabilitation services to the patients who have already developed some irreversible damage in their mental health due to severe mental disorders. Rehabilitations services like ‘vocational and occupational skills training’ in different areas.
• Providing daily therapeutic interventions like ‘group therapy’ and ‘group activities’ to the patients in order to alleviate their problems as well as raising their group interaction skills, social skills, group behaviour skills etc.
• Giving family intervention and therapy of different types to alleviate family pathology which are responsible for building up patient’s illness and/or helping the family members to maintain the normal functioning and develop problem solving skills.
• Provides direct and indirect mental health services in out patient and inpatient set ups of the institute, home and community settings. Community outreach services for betterment of patients are also regularly carried out by this department.
• Functions as the member of multi-disciplinary mental health service delivery team for handling patient’s needs, performing its duties in both promotive and curative mental health services.
• Performs psychosocial assessment of the patients for knowing their social milieu and environment in details in order to design appropriate treatment plans. Additionally family assessments are done to know about the family structure and functioning of the patients. Other therapeutic services like home visits, school and academic institutions visits and work place visits are done by the trainees of psychiatric social work to rectify the areas of malfunctioning or the issues which merit active clinical attentions.
• Self-help group development of the patients and their key caregivers to make them self-reliant and mutually supportive is also an important area of functioning of the department. Keeping the provision of frequent multifamily group interactions is another important area of activity of this department.
• Providing psychoeducation and counseling services to the key caregivers and other family members, friends  and neighbour in order to let them know about the diagnosis, aetiology, management, possible side effects of medications, duties and responsibilities of the family members towards the patients, ensuring their active cooperation in the patient care, ensuring medicine compliance and above all helping the family members to have better problem solving and coping skills to get used to with the stressful situation, viz., providing care to the patient as well as maintaining the family functioning in normal manner.
• Academic and research activities in the field of mental health is a major interest of this department. To make the students more prompts and skillful in dealing with ,the day-to-day patients care and know the subtle things about mental health regular departmental seminar, group discussions and case conferences are arranged by the teaching faculties of the department.