03 October 2004	Sunday	17 Shaban 1425

KARACHI, Oct 2: Speakers at a seminar held on Saturday underlined the need to create awareness among parents, teachers and the public about mental illness and its causes, in order to help diagnose the disease at an early stage.

Delivering presentation on "Psychiatric problems of children and adolescents", head of the Psychiatry department, Liaquat National Hospital, Dr Ayesha Qureshi, said there were hundreds of unreported cases of mental illness which could not get treatment at hospitals.

She said there was a lack of awareness, not only among uneducated parents, but also in highly-educated ones, about such illness, and mostly people try to get recovered through medicine and had less emphasis on going for psychotherapy or counselling.

"There is a general tendency among parents to blame children and the media for behaviour problems, rather than understanding the problem's etiology and thus to change the respective environment that has caused problems in their children and adolescents," she added.

She stressed the need for better parenting and teaching strategies to solve mental illness issues and said that psychiatrists, psychologist and social workers could play important role to achieve this goal.

Chairperson, Statistics department, University of Karachi, Prof Junaid Siddiqui, delivered a presentation on "Uses of mini-tab in social sciences" and said mini-tab was more user friendly and SPSS gave a wider variety of topics, which were essential for researches in social and basic sciences.

Director, Institute of Clinical Psychology, KU, Dr Seema Munaf, said the seminar would help professionals realize a better quality of life for patients under clinical psychology.

Later, some five KU students, including Salman Shahzad, Mohammad Rizwan, Sobia Aftab, Quratul Ain Saleem and Saba Zain presented their papers.

The seminar was followed by a poster exhibition.-PPI