Shahul Ameen, Prosenjit Ghosh, and Sujit Sarkhel join the Editorial Board of the Open Journal of Psychiatry (OJPAS®). Editor-in-Chief of Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, Shahul Ameen is the Psychiatrist from St. Thomas Hospital, Changanacherry, Kerala, India. Prosenjit Ghosh is the Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Silchar Medical College Hospital, Silchar, Assam, India, and Sujit Sarkhel is the Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kolkata, West Bengal, India.

The President of the Society for Mental Health in LAMIC (SoMHiL), Dr. Mythili Hazarika was a panelist at NIPCCD, Guwahati on ‘Child Abuse’ as a part of the sensitisation programme for the principals of Kendriya Vidyalayas and Novodaya schools of Northeast, Odisha, and West Bengal. Efforts were made to rip apart the rigid mindset and stringent rules in dealing with children’s emotional and behavioural issues. With children, only child friendly and child-centric approaches work, all others fail!

On the World Suicide Prevention Day, Dr. Mythili Hazarika, the President of the Society for Mental Health in LAMIC (SoMHiL), delivered a lecture in the Department of Psychology and Disability Studies, Gauhati University among the students and faculties, to enhance the knowledge and applied aspects of suicide prevention and reduction in the community.

Shyamanta Das, the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Journal of Psychiatry & Allied Sciences (OJPAS®) spoke on ‘Role of Family and Media in reducing Elder Abuse’ in the symposium on Elder Abuse, with RK Lenin Singh, Soumitra Ghosh, and S Gojendra Singh in the 14th Annual National Conference of Indian Association for Geriatric Mental Health (GERON 2018) in Imphal, Manipur. The symposium was chaired by Dr. Th. Bhimo Singh, Dr. RK Kumarjit Singh, and Dr. Arabinda Brahma.

The 14th Annual National Conference of Indian Association for Geriatric Mental Health (GERON 2018) is held in Imphal, Manipur. To commemorate the occasion, the souvenir-cum-scientific update, titled “Geriatric care: need for integration” is released. A SoMHiL (the Society for Mental Health in LAMIC) publication, this update with ISBN (978-81-935934-2-4) is edited by RK Lenin Singh and Shyamanta Das, the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Journal of Psychiatry & Allied Sciences (OJPAS®).

On 4 and 6 September, 2018 at Sun View Hotel, Guwahati, the President of the Society for Mental Health in LAMIC (SoMHiL), Dr. Mythili Hazarika delivered training on the “Psychological Aspect of Dealing with Cancer Patient” for an ongoing ‘Baseline study to understand the experience of cancer patients/ their family members in selected hospitals providing cancer care in Assam’. The objectives of this study are to understand the challenges faced by the cancer patients in current cancer setup and the issues related to accessibility, waiting times, out of pocket expenditures, quality of care.

Dr. Mythili Hazarika, the President of the Society for Mental Health in LAMIC (SoMHiL) attended the Teachers’ Day celebration at Udayachal, Guwahati with the Special Children and spoke on the role of parents and teachers for the full potential development of differently-abled students.

The Editor-in-Chief of the Open Journal of Psychiatry & Allied Sciences (OJPAS®), Shyamanta Das presented the poster, titled “An exploratory study from eastern India on neurological soft signs and spontaneous movement disorders in schizophrenia spectrum disorders”, co-authored by Samrat Singh Bhandari, Simanta Talukdar, Arunima Dutta, Nabanita Barman, and Dipesh Bhagabati, in the eight edition of the International Conference on Schizophrenia (IConS VIIII) of the Schizophrenia Research Foundation (SCARF) 2018 at Hyatt Regency, Chennai.