Conference Junkie

The first stop on this two week was the Association of European Psychiatrists Congress in Madrid, a rather massive general psychiatry conference with about eight to ten concurrent sessions for four days straight, where they scan the barcode on your name tag as you enter each session and the attendance is in the thousands, with about four or five New Zealanders and about twenty to thirty Australians. Big Pharma was in attendance, but with the current backlash against them, there were no free mugs, BBQ sets or free dinners (alternatively, I might not have been one of the cool kids). However, they did give away many books- indeed my luggage weight doubled.

Conference Highlights

• Q&A session with Professor David Goldberg from the Institute of Psychiatry. Yes, the current reforms in the UK revamping junior doctor training (MTAS and MMC – heaps of stuff in the BMJ) were not going well. There was confusion about having to reapply for your existing training post and if you were not from the European Union, you were going to be both unemployed and unemployable come August. Nothing new there, but on the optimistic side, he was hoping the dust would settle in a couple of years and that Australian and New Zealand trainees would be given a fair chance to continue or finish their training in the UK.
• An easy to follow plenary lecture by Professor Tyano (Tel Aviv, Israel) on Developmental Psychopathology. As an Old Age trainee, you do start losing bits of psychiatry quite quickly, but his diagrams and explanations of gene- environment, environment- gene, gene- gene (you get the picture) interactions were refreshing and illuminating. Beats a child psych textbook.
• The launch by pharmaceutical company Servier of a substance called agomelatine, an antidepressant with its primary properties being a M1 and M2 agonist and 5HT2 antagonist. We constantly hear about potential developments in antidepressants, but I must admit I had not heard of melatonin receptors being a target. The next generation of truly different antidepressants?

Overall, was the conference worth it? Certainly as a general psychiatry conference, it had some highlights and it was interesting, from a trainee’s perspective, to get an overview of psychiatry training in Europe. If you thought aligning our countries psychiatric training was a challenge, think about the twenty or so countries that make up the EU. From a clinical point of view, would I have learnt more compared, to say, attending the RANZCP Congress? Probably not.

Highlights of Madrid

• In the city centre, every second shop is a tapas bar, and given they open until 3am, one has to strike a careful balance between leisure time and conference attendance. The latter was also a bit challenging by being 30 minutes away by train from the city centre. I was also with a friend who came over from Blighty for a long weekend, so dinner and drinks all of a sudden became a seven to eight hour event.
• The last time in Madrid, my wife and I saw all the big museums, so I ended up only going to the Museo Renia-Sofia this time around. Apart from the perpetual Picasso highlight Guernica, there was a great retrospective by Chuck Close, an amazing American portrait artist who came into prominence in the mid-1960s. The exhibition included Fanny (pictured below), which measures over two metres by two metres and was painted with his fingers alone. I originally saw this in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC when travelling as a student over a decade ago, and it still does not fail to blow me away.
• It became a habit, after travelling in Europe many a year ago, to check for my wallet before leaving public transport. For the first time ever, on this trip, as I was walking out of a train, it was not. I yelled to my friend, turned around, and saw my wallet dropping from someone’s hand. A quick jump back in, a scoop off the floor and one hasty exit later, meant that I narrowly escaped being charged thousands of euros for dodgy 0900 calls for Russian phone sex. The pickpockets are that good.
• Never, ever let a beautiful woman get between you and a Spanish male waiter. You will not see service this side of siesta.
• Easyjet are not that bad. Just turn up on time to avoid being one of those whining angry types you see on Airline/Airport.

Next stop London.

Bradley Ng

(This report was made possible by the generous funding provided by NCTN (Auckland) and Waitemata DHB.)