DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHIATRY

The Academic Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at King Edward Medical University (KEMU) / Mayo Hospital Lahore was started in 1964 on an outpatient basis under Prof Muhammad Rashid Chaudhry, a former graduate of King Edward Medical College who joined as Consultant Psychiatrist and a teacher in King Edward Medical College in 1960. He also held the position of Medical Superintendent of Mayo Hospital from 1974-1975.
The Department of Psychiatry at KEMU has always had an organic connection to Lahore’s other venerable center for mental health services, Punjab Institute of Mental Health (PIMH, formerly known as ‘Mental Hospital’). Notably Colonel Lodge Patch, a former Medical Superintendent of Mental Hospital, has documented this describing his teaching about mental illness to students of Lahore Medical College (later King Edward Medical College).

An early pioneer of Psychiatry in Pakistan, Dr. Muhammad Rashid Chaudhry was appointed Professor of Psychiatry at King Edward Medical College in 1975. During his tenure an inpatient facility was added and later expanded in Mayo hospital and in 1978 UN/PAK Model Drug Abuse & Rehabilitation Centre was established. Dr. Rashid Chaudhry was one of the first Professors of Psychiatry in the country and one of the founders and later President of Pakistan Psychiatric Society. Professor I.A.K Tareen joined King Edward Medical College (KEMC) as Assistant Professor and was promoted to the position of Professor of Psychiatry after the retirement of Prof Chaudhry as the Head of the Department of Psychiatry in 1982. During the late 1970s and early 1980’s, KEMC’s Psychiatry Department grew into a fully staffed academic department with the creation of additional posts of Senior Registrars, Assistant and Associate Professors. This was in contrast to many other specialties in KEMC which were still operating with just one or two faculty members.
Prof. Tareen built on the early efforts of Prof. Rashid Chaudhry by helping expand the Psychiatry department while working as Associate Professor. The outpatient department, where the Psychiatry unit was situated was massively expanded to include the construction of new wards for Orthopedics, Neurology and Dermatology in addition to a separate floor for a new Department of Psychiatry, the first and largest in the Punjab in 1989 having space for separate Adult, Adolescent, Geriatric and Addiction units. A library, laboratory, conference room, psychotherapy and occupational therapy rooms and an ECT suite were part of the new structure. Teaching programs for training and research purposes involving foreign faculty members from UK, USA, Australia and other countries were a regular feature. In collaboration with the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Overseas Doctors Training Scheme was started and many talented trainees from this department went to the UK for further training and specialization and are now renowned consultants in the UK. The 14 bed UN/PAK Model Drug Abuse and Rehabilitation Centre was visited by Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales in 1991.
The Department of Psychiatry also had the singular honor of starting the Pakistan Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the first scientific journal in Psychiatry in Pakistan. Prof. Tareen and Associate Prof. Dr. Afzal Javed were the founders of this journal.
Prof. Tareen was followed by Dr Raheel Karim as the head of the department from 1998 to 2001. Professor Dr. M. Riaz Bhatti chaired the Department of Psychiatry from 2001-2012. He organized numerous international symposia and workshops and also revived the Community Outreach Program for psychiatric patients. Under this program senior doctors visited four District hospitals located in Lahore on a weekly basis.
Prof Dr. Aftab Asif joined as Professor and Head of Department in 2012. A former graduate of
King Edward Medical College and a former trainee at this department, Prof Aftab Asif’s position as Professor helped him to improve the undergraduate teaching curriculum of Psychiatry at KEMU in collaboration with the World Psychiatric Association. The country’s first Dementia Research Center in collaboration with Alzheimer’s International was established at the Psychiatry Department / Mayo Hospital Lahore in May 2013.

The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences is currently headed by Prof Dr. Ali Madeeh Hashmi. A graduate of King Edward Medical College, Prof. Hashmi is Board Certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, the first US trained psychiatrist to head the department in its history. Prof. Hashmi has been on the faculty of KEMU since 2010 and is currently also a senior examiner in Psychiatry with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Pakistan (CPSP) as well as an Examiner in Psychiatry with various universities. Along with Prof. Dr. Nazish Imran, who currently heads the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at KEMU/Mayo Hospital, Prof. Ali Hashmi is also a member of CPSP’s National Faculty of Psychiatry. During Prof. Hashmi’s tenure, the Department of Psychiatry has continued its steady growth into a national leader in psychiatric education, clinical service and research.
In 2014, for the first time in KEMU’s history, incoming first year medical students were given in-depth introductory seminars on basic behavioral science subjects which Dr. Hashmi helped design and facilitate. Dr. Hashmi’s paper ‘Urdu Translation of the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression: Results of a validation study’ was published in Pakistan in 2016 in the Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences, one of Pakistan’s few ‘Impact Factor’ medical journals. Together with his earlier paper “The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index: Validation of the Urdu Translation” (published in 2014), this research has created two enduring tools for psychiatric research in Urdu, Pakistan’s local language. Both the HAM-D (Urdu version) and the PSQI (Urdu) have become an enduring resource for researchers all across Pakistan. More than 250 researchers from Universities all over Pakistan have used these tools in their own researches. Prof. Hashmi’s team is now working on translating and validating other psychometric tools and the Department has plans to build a library of psychiatric research tools in Urdu for the benefit of Pakistani researchers. Prof. Hashmi is Section Editor and Founder of the section on “Medical Humanities” in Annals of King Edward Medical University. In this capacity, he has mentored and helped author several publications on Medical Humanities in KEMU’s Journal as well as popular publications. He has previously published on Medical Humanities in both Pakistan and regionally. Prof. Hashmi helped establish both a ‘Student Health and Career Guidance’ center at the Department as well as ‘Zain Haq Counseling Program’, a peer led medical student initiative to raise awareness and do advocacy for mental health and related issues on campus in 2017. Prof. Hashmi was the focal person for the Government of Punjab’s ‘Psychotrauma center’ established at the Department after the terrorist attack on Army Public School Peshawar in 2014. This center helped conduct multiple trainings and awareness sessions with media, law enforcement and school personnel on mental health and trauma in the years following the attack. When KEMU’s Punjab Telemedicine Centre of Excellence was established at the height of the COVID19 pandemic in 2020, he was entrusted with the responsibility of supervising the Tele-Psychiatry service. Prof. Hashmi has also worked hard to enhance KEMU’s links with its alumni organization in North America, the King Edward Medical College Alumni Association of North America (KEMCAANA). Along with other US trained and Board certified kemcolians in Lahore, Prof. Hashmi helped establish KEMCAANA’s first ever Pakistan chapter and he is the President-elect of KEMCAANA Pakistan chapter for 2026. KEMCAANA has been a generous supporter of the Department of Psychiatry at KEMU since Dr. Hashmi joined the Department in 2010 and has helped with multiple projects at the Department including the establishment of Punjab’s first Autism and Neurodevelopmental Center. The Department of Psychiatry is continuing to forge closer links with other critical specialties in KEMU. Currently planned projects include establishing an Emergency Psychiatry Unit in collaboration with the Department of Emergency Medicine, Mayo hospital, a Perinatal Psychiatry service in collaboration with Lady Aitchison hospital and ongoing collaboration with Punjab Institute of Mental Health where Prof. Hashmi holds an additional appointment as Professor of Psychiatry.

Our Vision

The vision of the Department of Psychiatry, King Edward Medical University is to become a leader in providing the highest values of excellence in clinical care, community service, education, innovative research and patient advocacy.

Our Mission

We are striving to develop our department to provide the highest quality health care in the appropriate socio-cultural and religious context of Pakistan. Our mission is threefold:

• To provide compassionate, safe and effective care of people with psychiatric and co-occurring disorders.
• To educate students, physicians, mental health professionals, and the general public about psychiatry and the behavioral sciences.
• To conduct innovative and relevant research into the understanding and treatment of people with psychiatric disorders, and into the prevention of these conditions.

The Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America (APPNA) as well as the King Edward Medical College Alumni Association of North America (KEMCAANA) has agreed to collaborate with the department to establish a Centre of Excellence in Psychiatric Research. A formal Memorandum of Understanding is due to be signed in this regard. Dr. Ali M. Hashmi, Associate Professor of Psychiatry will spearhead this project which is expected to generate high-quality research and publications in the coming years.

The psychiatric services include a 60-bed acute care short-term Adult & Adolescence psychiatric unit, a geriatric unit and a 14 bed Drug Abuse & Rehabilitation Centre for patients in need of alcohol and drug detoxification treatment. An extremely busy daily outpatient clinic provides treatment to patient with all kinds of psychiatric illnesses. All treatment programs utilize a bio-psychosocial model. Treatment modalities include a comprehensive psychiatric evaluation, pharmacotherapy and E.C.T. All paradigms of psychotherapy are applied including individual, family and group therapy and behavioral management techniques. A structured rehabilitation program helps in the integration of patients back into the society. We offer Consult-Liaison Psychiatric Services to all departments of Mayo and affiliated hospitals as we believe interdisciplinary academic collaboration is in the best interest of patients. An affiliated Child Psychiatry Department with a 6 bed inpatient as well as outpatient clinic provides care to children and their families. The Department Of Psychiatry also runs a day hospital and has a purpose built laboratory and a well established library.