Webinar - Live - Ask The Doctor: Autism & Mental Health: A Focus on Caregivers

This webinar will discuss the importance of supporting caregivers in the autism community and call attention to issues of equity in this domain. It will also make a case for the importance of promoting connectedness and compassion for self and others in programming supporting caregivers, and highlight the CARES program as an accessible option for caregivers looking for such resources.

Register Here: Ask The Doctor

Speakers: Dr. Sivapalan & Kira Vimalakanthan

A family doctor by profession, Dr. Sivapalan believes in the potential for change to the current diagnostic landscape for children with Autism. After six years of a busy and fruitful family practice, Dr. Sivapalan left his practice to help facilitate this change. With an interest in child development, Dr. Sivapalan has worked collaboratively with multiple stakeholders to design the M-DOC, a unique developmental screening initiative whose goal was to increase access to diagnosis and intervention support for newcomer communities. In addition, Dr. Sivapalan helped develop the CARES initiative, which employed a task-shifting model to provide mental health support for caregivers and siblings of children with autism. As a social doer, Dr. Sivapalan has initiated and managed various social impact projects both at the local and global level. Most recently, Dr. Sivapalan became the chief operating officer for “The Dunya Project”, a Canadian agri-tech start-up that is building a connected, climate-controlled modular hydroponic habitat to alleviate the devastating gap in access to affordable foods irrespective of climate conditions.

Kiruthiha Vimalakanthan, MA, is a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Waterloo. She is currently completing her pre-doctoral residency at Surrey Place. Driven by her passion to improve access to mental health supports in diverse communities, Kiruthiha has consulted on various projects at the South Asian Autism Awareness Centre (SAAAC). Kiruthiha’s primary role at SAAAC is the development and supervision of the CARES initiative, which employs a task-shifting peer-based model to provide mental health support for caregivers of children with autism. Preliminary outcomes of this program were recently published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.