Welcome to the EPA 2022 Interactive Programme 

Abstract Body

Headucate: University of East Anglia (UEA) is a student-led organisation aiming to raise awareness around Mental Health through their workshops and events.

Events in the last year have included a 24-hour live stream TV fundraiser, UEA’s first Psychiatry and Mental Health conference, a mental health themed stand-up show, mental health assistance workshops, a suicide prevention evening and a variety of panels. Headucate has also collaborated with Beat, the UK’s leading eating disorder charity, to run training aimed at Norwich Medical School students, other healthcare students and Professionals.

Headucate provides opportunities for their members, including research, education within the medical community, organising group projects, hosting poster competitions and by collaborating with likeminded initiatives.

Workshops were designed to include common mental health conditions; wellbeing; advice regarding looking after yourself and others; ways to get for support and the impact of COVID-19 on our mental health. They are arranged and delivered by our members to school children and university students; they have been adapted to an online platform, which allowed us to reach a wider audience.

Outcome measures demonstrating the impact of Headucate’s work were analysed via verbal, written and rated feedback, obtained from participants of workshops and events.

Headucate workshops can help to improve mental health awareness and education in schools; however, it is only a local initiative. To educate schools outside of Norfolk, Headucate’s repeatable model can be used to create new branches of organisations that can spread nationwide; so mental health education in schools can be promoted across the UK.

Abstract Body

Psychiatry is still considerably ‘young’ compared to other positive sciences. Thus, it holds a huge potential for improvement of the current diagnostic and classification systems and modes of treatment particularly. For instance, the Research Domain Criteria Project will certainly generate novel research questions that will shed a light upon mechanisms, and processes for the expression of psychiatric phenomenology and develop psychiatric treatments. The new era of Digital Psychiatry/Telepsychiatry and real-time mobile monitoring are other approaches that have a lot to offer to advance the field of psychiatry. Despite these developments, the stigma around psychiatry is still a big obstacle to tackle with. Addressing and reducing stigma during medical education should benefit from training and experience co-facilitated by people living with mental illness ideally starting from the early years in medical school. Besides clinic rotations, student clubs, student scientific congresses, and clinical research that facilitate contact with the patients may be potential platforms to attract medical students’ attention to the work of psychiatry. The speaker will touch upon some examples and implementations from the medical schools in Turkey.