On Wednesday 10th July, the headquarters of Proa Comunicación hosted the press conference in which the Alicia Koplowitz Foundation presented its 14th Scientific Conference, which this year will be held on 24th and 25th October in the Castellana 33 Auditorium of Mutua Madrileña. María Concepción Guisasola, Doctor of Medicine and Scientific Coordinator of the Alicia Koplowitz Foundation, and Mr. José Leoncio Areal, Patron-Secretary of the Foundation, announced the content of the presentations and round tables, dedicated in this edition to the 'Impact of Social Networks and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on child and adolescent mental health'. The press conference was attended by media such as Antena 3, Ondacero, Servimedia, ABC, Colpisa, EFE and Europapress, among others.
In this edition, as a novelty, the I Alicia Koplowitz Research Award will be presented, which will be endowed with 3,000 euros and will distinguish the best scientific research work published in 2018 by young researchers (under 40 years of age) members of the Association of Scientists in Child and Adolescent Mental Health - Alicia Koplowitz Foundation.
During her speech, Dr. Guisasola explained, based on publications by researchers, that the use of the internet, "and especially social networks", favours the practice of violations, among which she included meddling in the accounts of social networking sites, the creation of false profiles to provoke, threats and even invitations to suicide. For this reason, the Organising Committee of the 14th Scientific Conference decided to address the impact of social networks and ICTs on children's and young people's mental health, "seeking to respond to parents' concerns about their children's mental health, given that the use and abuse of new technologies and virtual reality raise many questions" for parents.
The scientific coordinator of the Alicia Koplowitz Foundation also justified the theme of the conference in the fact that addictions related to technological uses have been growing exponentially since 1995, when the term 'Internet addiction' was applied to them, recognised by the WHO as a health disease in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases.
Given this situation, he pointed out that experts believe that "there is growing scientific evidence to suggest that excessive use of social or networking sites can lead to symptoms traditionally associated with addictions or substances". Among these symptoms, he listed loss of control, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal and relapse, which fall within the components of Internet addiction.
María Concepción Guisasola also reviewed other ailments that recent research has associated with the excessive use of social networks, such as FOMO (fear of missing out), "a generalised fear that others may be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent", or Nomophobia, "intense fear of being without a mobile phone", and, "of course", cyberbullying, which she described as a "social problem, as well as a public health problem". The latter, he explained, is even more serious than ordinary bullying, as it is carried out under the shield of "anonymity".
Despite all of the above, the Organising Committee of the Scientific Conference wanted to make a statement in favour of technological advances and their influence on minors. In this sense, Guisasola pointed out that "social networks and new technologies have brought great advances and benefits to the mental health of children and adolescents, especially from the point of view of early detection, diagnosis and treatment". As an example of this, he highlighted the work of the DetectaWeb Projecta screening protocol led and developed by Spanish psychiatrists and psychologists in collaboration with Dutch colleagues. It allows early detection and prevention of future emotional disorders, which saves costs and offers more agility in the evaluation and analysis of results.
In terms of treatment, he listed as advantages of ICTs the ability to reach those in need at reasonable costs or the ease of implementing interventions designed to address different psychological disorders. Benefits whose potential is greater in the case of children and adolescents because they are "digital natives". As examples, he listed the effectiveness of Virtual Reality applications as an intervention tool in the field of Clinical and Health Psychology, which has been proven for almost two decades, or the use of serious games to promote health in various fields. However, he stressed that ICT-based applications designed to improve interventions with children or adolescents have not yet achieved the same expansion as in the case of adults, so he predicted that "they will experience a remarkable development in the near future".
The Alicia Koplowitz Foundation, through its different types of scholarships, has financed the training in prestigious international centres of almost two hundred doctors and psychologists in specialities related to children's mental health.