Cecilia will interrogate “what treatment for violence” in the clinic of autism through the documentary “her name is Sabine”,  Psychoanalysis and her own practice. She will speak about the challenges of working with children and young people that use violence as a response and some of the little solutions that are put at work in plural practice.

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Gloria Kirwan is Assistant Professor of Social Work at Trinity College Dublin and she is also a registered social worker. Gloria has a particular interest in identifying the needs of people who experience serious and chronic periods of mental distress and her research over many years has aimed to bring greater understanding to the factors that either help or hinder individual recovery.

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Gloria will speak about her findings from a research project with people that had been admitted to mental health services involuntarily. She will interrogate the impact of not being heard described as “silence violence”.

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Dr. Aoife Twohig is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and child psychotherapist. Aoife has conducted research on attachment and social-emotional development and has a special interest in infant mental health and the clinical implications of attachment in particular early attachment development and later vulnerability to maltreatment, abuse and trauma. Aoife currently works within the Paediatric Liaison service and St. Louise’s Unit at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital Crumlin and is also involved in the clinical training programme of the Irish Institute of Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.

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I hope to cover in my piece the continuities and discontinuities between attachment vulnerability, psychopathology, aggression and violence. I hope to illustrate from my experience the impact of violence on children, in particular the notion of a ‘pandemic’ of violence experienced by children globally, and how the origins of  some violent acts may be understood from an attachment and psychoanalytic perspective. I think its also important to highlight that violence is not synonymous with psychiatric disorder,and medical management is only one potential intervention where psychiatric illness is assessed comprehensively and diagnosed.