10 symposia, 6 Lectures, 4 Workshops, & 2 Plenary Lectures, Held on 3rd Day of ASCAPAP

By 1 2 1 News Reporter

Chandigarh 27^th September:----- The third day of the 7th Congress of the Asian Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions (ASCAPAP) & 12th Biennial Conference of the Indian Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (IACAM), which is being organized by the Department of Psychiatry, PGIMER, Chandigarh, headed by Prof Savita Malhotra, at Hotel Ashok, New Delhi, was packed with many varied and enriching scientific programmes by child mental health professionals from all over the world. There were overall 10 symposia, 6 state-of-the-art lectures, 4 workshops, 2 plenary lectures, numerous other free paper and poster presentations by eminent and budding mental health professionals. In the EC meeting of ASCAPAP, Dr. Savita Malhotra was unanimously elected as the president of ASCAPAP for the coming two years. This was another feather in her cap of achievements and honours.

 

Dr. Alan Apter, Chairman of the Feinberg Child Study Center and the Department of Psychological Medicine, Schneider's Children's National Medical Center of Israel, delivered a plenary lecture on suicides in children and adolescents. He spoke on the various risk factors for suicidal behaviors in children and adolescents and preventive strategies for the same.

Our society has been caught in between the traditional and the more "Western" parenting and child-rearing methods. This, along with other myriad factors, such as unwanted children, inconsistent parenting, working mothers and the overall changing family structure, has led to various new kinds of psychopathology in children and adolescents brought up in non-western societies. Dr. Michael Hong, Professor of Psychiatry at Seoul National University, spoke on the crisis of parenting in this globalizing world in his plenary. It is well known that personality problems in adulthood have their developmental origins in childhood. Dr. Pratap Sharan, Professor at AIIMS, New Delhi gave an in-depth insight about these childhood antecedants of personality disorders in his state-of-the art lecture. Dr. Porpavai Kasiannan from Melbourne and his colleagues who are running a NGO in India for children with various mental disabilities held a workshop on "Pathways to Effective Parenting" - a focused, short term intervention that was developed in 2012 as a suitable training program for Indian parents. A symposium headed by Dr. Manju Mehta, from AIIMS, New Delhi was also held on parent management training programs in major child psychiatric disorders. Dr. Vasudha Agarwal conducted a workshop dealing with life skill training for promotion of mental health of children and adolescents.