Conference to detect Autism in children next Wednesday

A conference to educate parents and teachers on how to detect autism in children is one of the many steps being taken to break the stigma attached to the neurodevelopmental disorder.

This conference is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, August 2, at the Kingstown Evangelical Church, opposite Victoria Park, beginning at 2:30 p.m.

Dr Mishka Duncan-Adams, paediatric neurologist, said that Vincentians do not know much about autism or behavioural problems on a whole.

“They (children) tend to be misunderstood by their parents, by their teachers, by their peers and they may actually be deemed as a child that is not smart, which can be untrue, or a child that is just bad behaved and gets punished for no reason because persons don’t understand these kinds of behaviours,” Duncan-Adams explained.

She added that parents who recognize their child is different tend to be in denial, or hide that child away from the rest of society.

The paediatric neurologist also said that some parents know their child is autistic, but are unaware of how they should deal with that child.

“We are trying to break that stigma, let people be educated and understand how autistic children are in their behaviours and what we should expect from them and how we should approach and deal with it,” she told SEARCHLIGHT.

Duncan-Adams said that there is a great need for a speech and behavioural therapist in St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG).

The conference is one part of a mission scheduled for July 31 to August 3, which will see three speech pathologists from abroad coming to assess children with speech issues.

One speech pathologist has additional training in behavioural therapy, with emphasis on autism and will facilitate the conference in detecting children with autism.

“We’re going to have clinics with patients that we would have already captured and had in our database over the year. These patients, we already saw them before at the neurology clinic at the hospital,” Duncan-Adams said.

The mission is a collaborative effort between the World Paediatric Project (WPP), the Rotary Club of SVG, the Ministry of Health and the Kingstown Evangelical Church.(BK)