Reflections on AACAP 2021 Meeting
In October 2021, I attended the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) virtual annual meeting. I was thrilled to be invited to write a couple of brief reflective pieces for the Medical Student & Resident (MSR) December newsletter and the AACAP News Jan/Feb 2022 edition.
The first piece is just some overall thoughts about how the meeting went and what I got out of it. The second is more personal and targeted to specific sessions.
Reflections from a First-Time Attendee
As an MS2 and first-time attendee to the 2021 AACAP Annual Meeting, I was blown away by the immense thoughtfulness and passion that went into each session. Because of school obligations, I regret I was not able to attend my first session until Wednesday of the second week, during which I joined University of Utah Triple Board Program Director Dr. Kristi Kleinschmit's breakout room at the MSR Meet & Greet. We had a rich discussion on what drew her to TB, and among the main reasons she mentioned was the ease in working across systems of care. I noticed on the schedule that there was a primer I could attend on that topic and added it to my list.
For the rest of the week, I had the opportunity to volunteer at the MSR mentorship programming nights by monitoring the flow of breakout rooms and facilitating discussion. I was glad to be paired with Dr. Afifa Adiba, an AACAP representative to the AMA who shares my interest in leveraging organized medicine for mental health advocacy, and Dr. Sarah Arshad, a TB physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who advocates for cultural humility and intersectionality frameworks in psychiatry.
By the end of Saturday, I found myself with a massive backlog of more topics than I knew what to do with. As I reflect on the breadth of the recordings I had a chance to watch — from learning what a Pecha Kucha is to learning about the sobering implications of climate change on youth mental health — it appeared that the meeting left no stone unturned and had something for everyone.
I now have a more concrete idea of which aspects of CAP I like and why, and I appreciate that AACAP can be a space to explore my interests in how Western norms of masculinity manifest in childhood entertainment and pop culture. I am so thankful to my mentors to help guide my career vision, and after viewing Dr. Ani Chakraborty’s (CAP at Wayne State University) and Bharat Sanders’ (MS4 at Medical College of Georgia) presentation “The Magic of Peer Mentorship” at the AALI Idea Forum, I understand the saying that even though our membership may be relatively small in numbers, our community is large and welcoming.
Reflections from 2021 AACAP Virtual Meeting
As an MS2 and first-time attendee, I did not even know where to start in creating my conference watchlist, and by the end I had a massive backlog of content I did not know what to do with. I thank my mentor Bharat Sanders (MS4, MCG) for directing me to the sessions that aligned well with my goals.
A session that struck a chord with me was Dr. Jose Mantilla-Rivas' (University of Pittsburgh CAP-1) Pecha Kucha "Connection in Isolation." I related deeply to his feeling that he could not apply to himself the same standards of care and nurturing he provides others. For much of my adolescence and young adulthood, I have been so receptive to the pain of my friends. But when it is I who is suffering, I feel like I do not want to burden anyone else. His words helped me realize that in order to proclaim the wellness mantra "take care of yourself," we must all strive to create an environment throughout medical training in which we are all valued and made to feel worthy enough to do so.
After viewing "Cultural Influences and Intergenerational Trauma" led by Tufts CAP PD Dr. Neha Sharma, I started to reflect more on why at times I had felt I could not be vulnerable around my loved ones. I would hide my emotional struggles to avoid judgment of community members because it was frequently reinforced to prioritize others’ opinions over my wellbeing. Religion was a source of great personal fulfillment, and yet it was also a catch-all shield to avoid unravelling the nuances of any difficulties I experienced. Every word spoken at the session was invaluable as I previously did not have the vocabulary to articulate the very concepts that hit so close to home (e.g. “acculturative family distancing,” “parent-child role reversal,” etc).
Dr. Deepika Shaligram's (CAP at Boston Children’s Hospital) concluding remarks, "Males also have less of a permission to have emotional suffering…is contrary to the idea of being strong" also set off another chain of flashbacks for me. I was bullied in childhood for having “girly” interests or otherwise for not fitting the hegemonic masculine mold, from what music I chose to listen to, the clothes I wore, to even what I would eat for lunch — as if certain modes or attributes of self-expression were just effeminizing. It was not until several years later that I realized the absurdity of a song or color determining one’s gender, or that gentleness is an inherently feminine trait. The homophobic slurs I had received primarily served to gatekeep the boundaries of acceptable expressions of masculinity.
Going forward, I would like to study the internalization of Western norms of masculinity from a very young age across various channels of socialization such as family, film, and pop culture, as well as the effect of one’s cultural or ethnic background on such. Though research in the area may be sparse, I fear that the reinforcement of binarized gender stereotypes in childhood has negative mental health implications. Over the past few years, however, there have been notable cracks in the fortress of toxic masculinity including Justin Baldoni’s 2017 Ted Talk and Gillette’s 2019 commercial. For the 2022 AACAP Meeting, I would like to propose a session tracing this trajectory and exploring what it means to be a man.