Event Profile
A National Conference on Changing Fabric of Intimate Relationships - Challenges to Theories and Practices in Mental Health will aim on the challenges thrown up for psychotherapists, counselors, social workers by the evolving dynamics of intimate relations. The conference will attempt to closely engage with understanding the shifts in the macro system which have impacted the material and family relations – how changes in the larger social system have percolated to the individuals and rippled into the subsystems of marriage and family. The conference would aim at capturing stories of mental health professionals from the field, who have had to re-negotiate their pre-conceived notions of marital/family therapy, and in the process, learnt valuable lessons while engaging with difficult clients/families. It will also focus on and give voice to relationships that remain in the margins of social systems, like gay and lesbian intimacies, live-in and cyber relationships. The conference would also like to discuss the challenges faced by young mental health professionals in making a radical paradigmatic shift from individual therapoy to a systemic framework, by grappling with the larger issues of gender, power, and socio-politico-cultural process.
The themes of the conference on CFIR would be:
Family structures in transition, Culture and diversity issues in intimacy, Emerging contexts of intimacies- work and cyberspace, alternative sexualities and intimacies in the context of HIV-AIDS, Current challenges to mental health practices, Intimacies in therapeutic relationships, Evolving training needs in mental health, Information technology and changing human relationships, Challenges to parenting, Violence and intimacies.
