On November 3, 2022, the Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) held an annual meeting to gather YCSC Associates and other community members together and feature the multi-faceted work of the center. Over 100 participants joined the virtual meeting, which was the most well attended session to date. The annual event has been held since the mid 1980’s and historically convened in person, but the format shifted to the Zoom platform due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The 2022 meeting included supplemental content through a virtual poster session, pre-recorded mini-talks, and select supplemental publications. The three-hour live event featured five panels in line with the theme, Resilience in a Time of Crises: Applying Science & Innovation to Support Families. YCSC Chair Linda Mayes, MD, opened the meeting by welcoming attendees and addressing “what is an unprecedented behavioral health surge.”
Mayes continued, “right before COVID, our referral rates for child mental health services were on the rise, and at this point they've doubled, and are a little more than double. Depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and eating disorders have greatly increased among all the families that we see, as has the severity of the needs that children and adolescents have.” She went on to say that a high priority of the center is to directly address these clinical needs while simultaneously working to innovate and inform clinical practice with research.
With this, Mayes introduced the panelists for the afternoon, who shared clinical case studies, programmatic updates, and more. The panels focused on the areas of in-home work through the Intensive In-Home Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Services, childhood anxiety programming through the Program for Anxiety Disorders, responding to the traumatic impact of violence through the Center for Traumatic Stress and Recovery, supporting perinatal health and wellbeing though the Parent and Family Development Program/Health-Omics & Perinatal Epidemiology, and experiences of siblings of individuals on the Autism spectrum through the Developmental Disabilities Clinic.
The virtual poster session and pre-recorded mini-talks featured a variety of additional topics, from social and emotional learning, reducing burnout for therapists providing trauma-informed care, and caring for youth with high-risk eating disorder presentations to adolescent depression, cognitive development in a non-human primate model, and more.
Information about upcoming events will be posted on the YCSC website when available. To receive notification about this and other YCSC events in your inbox, please subscribe to YCSC Connections.