Dear MPA members,

On 18th February 2008, I chaired my last meeting as the President of MPA before our BGM. I wish to take this opportunity to thank all my committee members for your hard work. I also wish to inform all members that we have reached our target of RM 1 million for the Association. I am also pleased to highlight that we managed to launch our Malaysian e-Journal of Psychiatry, which has replaced the printed Malaysian Journal of Psychiatry. 

We have good reason to be proud, as we are among the first in Malaysia to launch an e-Journal for a Malaysian Medical Journal. Since the e-Journal makes it easier to publish our articles and publications, I do hope that our psychiatrists will be interested in publishing their scientific work to be shared with others, and there shouldn’t be any more excuses for us not to publish our work in MPA’s journal. I can’t stress enough my hope that our objective of making sure that every psychiatrist can publish their work will be materialized. 

I have requested Associate Professor Dr Mohd. Jamil Bin Yaacob to be our Editor-in-Chief to make sure that the procedures for written articles to be published in the e-Journal are user-friendly and presentable. Please submit your publication via email to editor@psychiatry-malaysia.org. Our Web Committee has also created an e-bulletin for our members, which aims to publish all other articles, which are not published in the e-Journal. Therefore, if you think that your article may not be approved for publishing in the e-Journal, please don’t hesitate to submit your article anyway, as it can still be published in the e-bulletin. This is also a way to encourage young psychiatrists and trainees to publish their written work on MPA’s website. 

The present committee has also solved the problem of buying the premises for our Association. We are currently waiting for the approval from ROS, before we can buy the building. According to Dr Siti, MPA’s Secretary, we will receive news from ROS in a month’s time. Our present committee has worked closely with industries to organize think tank groups through smart partnerships. The benefits gained for us is to give psychiatrists the opportunity and room to express their ideas and suggestions of how we can offer the best services for our patients. In this regard we are now in the process of restructuring our Psychosocial rehabilitation program, so that it will focus more specifically on patients, family and community participation. 

The biggest success that we have managed to accomplish through gathering of ideas from our think tank groups are from the National 2 R projects (reduce referral projects). This project, which was initially suggested by me, and considering its humble beginning, now continues to attract more participation. We can now see significant reductions of referrals from general hospitals to mental institutions. What we hope to achieve in this century is to change the role of mental institutions to small research centers and centers of excellence for forensic psychiatry. Hopefully this will finally curb the stigma of such centers. In fact, I have proposed to the anti-stigma campaign committee headed by Dr Abdul Kadir to give the Pinel award and best psychiatry setting awards. This should be organized through our smart partnership with relevant companies. The date for this event will be on 8th August 2008 and will be in conjunction with the Schizophrenia Awareness Day . It is my hope that MPA together with University Malaya will organize the events. 

Lastly, I wish to announce our BGM which will be held on 1st March 2008. The venue is in IZZI restaurant and I really hope that all members will come and exercise their voting rights. I wish to reassure you that our present committee has managed to build a strong foundation for a new committee to bring our Association to the next level of progress. I really pray that the next elected members will have strong intellectual capacities and desire to bring our Association to its best level. My personal view is that there are some among us, who are very well suited and they are mainly our young psychiatrists. My only proposal is to elect at least 90 percent of the present committee again to ensure continuity of our work. 

Thank you! 

Professor Dr Mohamad Hussain Habil 

President of MPA 2006-2008