UK Association of Infant Mental Health (AIMH) National Conference

‘Mentalizing in the Time of COVID-19: Restoring Our Ability to Think About Babies

Program Location

Virtual

Program Objectives

This conference will provide attendees with the opportunity to reflect on the traumatizing effects of the recent COVID-19 pandemic on parents and infants, and the importance of a mentalizing stance, to enable families to recover.

The programme will address the following issues:

• the ways in which pregnant women and parents of young babies were traumatized by the pandemic

• in which the pandemic affected the ability of practitioners to maintain a mentalizing stance, and thereby to support the mentalizing capacity of parents.

• what the concepts of mentalization/reflective functioning and embodied mentalization have to offer in terms of helping infant mental health practitioners to address the trauma in babies and children that may have resulted from the pandemic.

• what ‘effective’ frontline methods of working with parents and babies during the pandemic involved, and how to restore the capacity of traumatized families for reflective functioning.