Addictologist Ondřej Sklenář shows the premises of the former waiting room, which within a few months have been transformed into a workplace of child and adolescent psychiatry and addictionology.
There is already a great demand for the help of experts. “Currently, we already have about 40 to 50 children ordered. I don’t know how many we have already investigated,” explains psychiatrist Sandra Sklenářová.
He most often encounters anxiety in his office. “Currently, the most common depressive and anxiety syndrome is – mostly in adolescent girls. Often manifested by not coming to school, self-harm or sometimes even suicidal thoughts. This is our typical patient now,” adds Sklenářová.
The surgeries also include non-traditional aids – such as stones. “We use them to make it more visual. If, for example, you have a family of five and an eight-year-old child puts everyone next to him, except for the mother at the other end of the table, it may say something about the fact that the mother in the family is somehow distant,” explains Sklenář.
There are few child psychiatrists in the Czech Republic
However, there is still a great shortage of child psychiatrists in the Czech Republic, only 10 doctors with this specialization work in the Ústí Region. The solution could be elaborate cooperation with Mental Health Centers.
“We don’t want to lock those people somewhere behind bars, we want to treat them in the environment they come from and we want them to return there as quickly as possible. That’s the idea of the Mental Health Center – it should be local,” explains the chairman of the UJEP Psychiatric Clinic, Jakub Albrecht, adding that the mutual cooperation of experts is on the right track.