Wholesome environment around children better for mental health: Doctors

Dr Srinath talked about some basic yet impactful evidence based preventive interventions terming them ‘kernels’. These kernels included simple tips to promote health and productivity like reduced TV time for children and teenagers, meaningful roles for kids at home, verbal praise to improve parent-child relationships, workplace relationships, use of direct praise notes in school, family or home, and encouragement of soft team competition.

In one of the sessions, Dr Savita Malhotra, a child psychiatrist from Chandigarh highlighted the need for a shift of focus of prevention from early childhood to infancy. In India, child psychiatry itself is in an infancy stage and a discipline like infant psychiatry has a long way to go.

Dr Savita added that there is irrefutable evidence indicating that the first years of life make more qualitative and quantitative difference than any other time of life. Early experiences shape the brain affecting lifelong health, behaviour and learning.

The conference also opened policy perspectives of bringing global attention to preventive mental health. The Department of psychiatry, GMCH 32 under Prof B S Chavan has been running a child guidance clinic regularly, besides a special clinic catering to children with autism and a distinct parent training in group settings for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism spectrum disorders.

Conference secretary Prof Priti Arun, while speaking on the occasion, said the conference empowered not only mental health professionals working in the field but also involved multi-disciplinary professionals like teachers as well as parents.

The conference was attended by around 250 delegates from across India and included 29 workshops covering various aspects of child and adolescent mental health.