Dear members, colleagues, friends and fellows in Bangladesh and beyond,
Warm greetings from Bangladesh Clinical Psychology Society (BCPS)!
Please note that the current EC committee of BCPS got elected on the 5th August, 2016, for 2 years, and immediately resumed its office, from the previous EC committee. As a newly elected President of BCPS, it’s my great pleasure to write this message for you all: members, potential members and non-members, as our valuable audience, fellow observers and citizens at large.
Bangladesh Clinical Psychology Society is stepping ahead with its vision -“Clinical Psychology for quality life” whereas its mission statement is to promote and advance mental health within the context of improving psychosocial wellbeing through scientific psychological and its allied multidisciplinary knowledge base. Besides this, the Society supports research, education and professional training, promoting and ensuring the highest standards of effective, efficient and ethical practices by its members. BCPS is socially responsible to ensure that psychological knowledge, policies and practices are considered by the policy makers and community leaders in different local, institutional and national emergent issues.
Bangladesh Clinical Psychology Society follows five years’ strategic plan, the current one being from 2013 to 2018. So, the current executive committee will follow the activity flow from the previous planning work, as well as will revise and update it for the next two years.
Bangladesh Clinical Psychology Society has a mandate to make people aware to reduce stigma and discrimination associated with seeking mental health treatment from service providers like us, who are part of the members of multidisciplinary mental health treatment team – namely psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, psychiatric social workers, psychiatric nurses; also including with such professional team, there is also crying need to support community mental health workers, counselors and other paraprofessionals, whose practices are required to be supervised and monitored through a multi-disciplinary qualified mental health team of professionals, to protect the best interest of our clients and patients. Considering this, we regularly arrange public awareness programs like rally, human chain, mental health related workshops, special seminars and round table discussions – while observing the World Mental Health Day every year (on October 10th) from 1998. In the last two decades of our active inception and our professional existence, we are really delighted that by now we have been successful in creating some friends and admirers, who are interested to participate in our regular public awareness programs and are ready to share their views in our colorful moments of the year. Other than this, we have a regular publication named “MONOVUBON” comprised of many write up on mental health problems, interventions in a self-help form in Bengali, so that people can be in touch with us. Many of our members participate on different television and radio programs to make society aware about correct mental health issues. Most importantly, we are now emphasizing for our professional clinical psychologists to make ourselves more accessible through website, where anyone can virtually reach our postings, information, member details, list of our qualified clinical psychologists practitioners, and so on. I hope that you will enjoy our website and give us feedback and suggestions on any relevant issue of Clinical Psychology profession, on which the BCPS as a public society can work on, and thus we can keep our public accountability, commitment and our expected and set standard of our clinical psychological practice of the time, suitable and applicable in the practice context in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh Clinical Psychology Society is working wholeheartedly to provide and ensure standard and ethical practices toward community people of Bangladesh. On this purpose our current effort is to materialize/establish legal status for Clinical Psychologists through Bangladesh Clinical Psychology Council Act (BCPCA) where specific goal would be: ensuring rights of each and every single service recipient of clinical psychology through establishing a registration and professional licensing of clinical psychologists working in Bangladesh, and thus, to ensure quality and standard of clinical psychology courses, training and internships, as well as practice standard for Bangladesh. Draft of BCPCA has been done through a process of our internal and public dialogue, and which is now being in the process of editing by the lawyers.
As we are committed to provide ethical and safe practices, we are in the process of regulating our current activities as general member and enhancing current skill and knowledge through regular group clinical supervision, Continuing Professional Development (CPD) lectures and sessions, clinical record keeping and documentation through clinical auditing, guidelines for minimum standard of clinical practices, code of ethics (yearly 2 events where every member must be present at least once), and program on care for the care givers (burn out management program).
Currently, Bangladesh Clinical Psychology Society is willing to work with other organizations, nationally and internationally, as well as expanding collaborations and connections with other academic and professional organizations related to psychology, psychiatry, mental health and well being of people and community/organizations in Bangladesh, so that all of us can respond to the crisis and needs of our people, family, community, society and its institutions, in a positive and effective manner.
Beyond working only for the clinical psychologists, Bangladesh Clinical Psychology Society is providing training on basic counseling skills and mental health promotion and management related training/workshops to other psychologists and mental health professionals and interested persons, who wish to work on mental health or other forms of care practices in Bangladesh. In this respect, we are currently organizing basic counseling and psychotherapeutic skills development programs for professionals other than clinical psychologists (specially psychologists, psychotherapists, counselors, mental health cum psycho-social workers, psychological and mental health first aid volunteers) aiming to enhance their care practice skills in the field, or as a human being for their close people and fellow neighborhood and citizens.
Apart from this, we want to share our recent commitment to publish a scientific journal soon, where researchers will have the opportunity to publish their research papers on mental health, clinical psychological and other allied psychological and social topics: from theoretical, empirical, methodological, indigenous and cross-cultural research and practices, along with challenging policy and practice debates.
Bangladesh Clinical Psychology Society does organizes its national conferences and seminars, and so far we have been successful in organizing our four national conferences in collaboration with the Department of Clinical Psychology Department of Dhaka University and from 2013 also with Dr. Nasirullah Psychotherapy Unit (NPU) of DU. In our next plan on organizing conference, I will finish this message by informing you with great delight and with a huge sense of responsibility that, Bangladesh Clinical Psychology Society is going to host 6th Asian Cognitive Behavior Therapy Conference on 9-12 February, 2018 (acbtcdhaka2018.com/home), organized by the Asian CBT Association, where we hope to have a highly enthusiastic scientific, as well as practitioner community, to join us and share their accomplishments to the Asian and world community. It is our hope that our active participants and audience in that Asian CBT conference will get ample opportunity to learn from Asian and World leaders, academicians and practitioners in CBT and its allied fields. Please follow our website, and do early bird registration, be prepared to submit your papers/posters, and to participate in the significant workshops related to CBT and its allied knowledge and practices, details of which will be announced soon!
Dr. M. Kamruzzaman Mozumder,
Professor,
Dept. of Clinical Psychology,
University of Dhaka
Email: mozumder@du.ac.bd