Training Event with Dr Yolande Ferguson
Saturday, November 1, 2014 – 11:00 to 13:30
Carmelite Centre, Aungier St, Dublin 2
This presentation will cover two main areas. The first is an overview of how a modern mental health service in Ireland works. A pathway of care from referral to assessment and treatment will be discussed along with clinical case examples.
The second part of the talk will focus on the introduction of DSM V last year. This is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual published by the American Psychiatric Association. Although in Ireland we use the International Classification of Disorders 10 for clinical use, the DSM remains the manual used for research purposes and points to key issues in psychiatric nosology and diagnosis today. Key changes include:
- Autism spectrum disorders – this includes Aspergers syndrome. There was significant concern about this tightening of diagnosis from service user/carers in the USA that they would not be able to access supports/ cover from their insurers
- Intellectual disability took over from the old term of mental retardation
- Somatoform disorders – this had long been recognized as a mess of a diagnostic category and the reclassifications have gone some way towards addressing this
- The addition of specifiers to diagnostic categories. This allows for the coding of common additional symptoms/features. There are also severity ratings that often focus on functional impairment.
- A manual devised by numerous committees obviously will have some problems. These include concerns that some behaviours will be medicalised and that evidence was not prioritized over consensus.
Dr Yolande Ferguson is a consultant in General Adult and Community Psychiatry with the Dublin South Central Mental Health Service. She started her training in psychiatry in Western Australia, returning to Ireland to achieve her Core Competency in Specialist Training. She is dual trained in General Adult and Liaison Psychiatry. She is member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland. She completed a Masters degree in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in 2004 with St. Vincent’s/UCD. Her thesis was on Borderline Personality disorder.
Contact Carol Owens at [email protected] or Marlene ffrench-Mullen [email protected] with any queries.
Price: Members €25 and Students €10