Dr. Cathy Chovaz delivers keynote presentation at the 5th World Federation of the Deaf Asia Conference
October 21, 2016
King’s professor, Dr. Cathy Chovaz, was a keynote presenter at the 5th World Federation of the Deaf Asia Conference in Singapore from October 14-16, 2016. Dr. Chovac's keynote was entitled: "Mental Health and Deaf People: What are the facts?" The conference is a global forum to discuss issues and ideas related and relevant to deaf development, especially pertaining to developing nations in Asia. The conference hosts 17 member countries represented with a number of different spoken and signed languages.
Dr. Chovaz describes the importance of her keynote topic, “it is quite clear that there is considerable diversity across countries in the world with some recognizing the deaf identity and sign languages of Deaf peoples as true authentic languages with traditions and cultures whereas other countries still sadly marginalize Deaf people. Mental health is a very important issue and the stigma needs to be removed to promote better identification and treatment of mental health disorders.”
Dr. Chovaz is an associate professor in Psychology at King’s University College, and Canada’s first Deaf clinical psychologist. She is also the director of the King’s Centre for Deaf Educational Advancement Forum (CDEAF) that works to improve mental health services for Deaf Canadians and support the dedicated professionals who work in the field. CDEAF hosts a bi-annual conference at King’s, the most recent one being this past June.
“In addition, we are in need of clinicians with specialized training and experience working with Deaf individuals and mental health disorders across the globe. I challenged the 17 countries as to what each were doing to improve mental health in their countries and shared the work we are doing at CDEAF at King's,” says Dr. Chovaz.
At King’s, Dr. Chovaz teaches courses on child and adult clinical psychology. Her research focuses on Deaf children and autism spectrum disorder, the mental health functioning of Deaf and hearing school children, and ASL interpreters and mental health settings.
To learn more about the Psychology department at King’s, click here.
To learn more about CDEAF, please click here.