Welcome to the 21st WCP Virtual Congress Program Scheduling

The COVID pandemic has been devastating not only due to its direct impact on people’s lives, physical health, and socio-economic status, but also for its impact on mental health. Several studies demonstrated that the pandemic and the lockdown, a measure adapted in most of the countries worldwide to overcome the contagion situation, increased anxiety and depression in the general population. Great concern exists about the psychological consequences of the pandemic, in terms of the short and long term impact on the mental health, particularly, of individuals already suffering from a psychiatric disease. This population are more vulnerable, having a higher risk of infection and of suffering complications of COVID-19, due to the illness per se, cognitive deficits and medical comorbid conditions. In the first talk, Brisa Solé, aims to revise whether the lockdown measures were more aversive for individuals with a previous psychiatric disorder compared to unaffected relatives and healthy controls. In the second intervention Norma Verdolini will revise several measures that may influence health outcomes such as resilience, affective temperament, perceived family environment and trauma experiences. In the last lecture, Laura Montejo, aims to analyze the prevalence of self-reported cognitive deficits during lockdown in the psychiatric population and to describe the clinical variables associated. This symposia aims to tackle the relationship between the current pandemic and the mental health, in order to establish psychological intervention programs to relieve the effects of confinement, focusing on improving psychiatric symptoms, cognitive deficits and providing tools to improve resilience, enhancing protective factors.