Welcome to Nasera Cader-Mokoa as co-chair of the Department of Psychiatry & Mental Health Social Responsiveness Committee

Nasera Cader-Mokoa has just been elected as co-chair of the Social Responsiveness Committee in the Department of Psychiatry & Mental Health at the University of Cape Town. We thought it would be helpful to introduce Nasera and her interests in Socially Responsive Psychiatry & Mental Health to the Departmental and broader community.

Nasera is a Clinical Psychologist and Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry & Mental Health. She was appointed full-time in 2010 when she joined the Female Acute Unit at Lentegeur Hospital in Cape Town. She spent 6 years within the service working with women with serious mental health challenges. She became curious about the rate and pattern of readmissions on the unit which resulted in a peer-reviewed paper in International Psychiatry entitled “The Revolving door: a profile of acute admissions at a South Afican Psychiatric Hospital”. Around the same time she became involved with the Saltan Bahu Centre, a community-based substance abuse treatment and aftercare facility in Mitchell’s Plain, Hanover Park and Parow for adults with substance abuse difficulties. Inspired by this experience, “Dual Diagnosis groups” for adults with mental health and co-occuring substance use problems were formed and implemented within the Provincial structures including on inpatient wards, where they are still running.

After having her daughter her personal interest in Maternal-Infant Mental Health increased. This was the impetus for increasing her collaboration with the Child and Adolescent Mental Health services. A clinic was formed and women who were pregnant and/or had a post-partum onset of psychiatric illness were presented at this clinic. This paved the way for a collaboration with Dr Nancy Suchman from Yale University on mentalization-based interventions for mothers with serious mental illnesses and their infants (who would be at high risk due to their mother’s illness). Ms Cader was part of a pre-pilot study led by Dr Suchman and Prof Astrid Berg (Emerita Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at UCT). As part of the pre-pilot study, Ms Cader conducted an 8-week invention with mentally-ill mothers of infants under the age of 3. Findings from this study were published in Development & Psychopathology The Mothering from the Inside Out: Adapting an evidence based intervention for high risk mothers in the Western Cape of South Africa has been published in Development & Psychopathology Journal (2019).

References:

Vally,V., Cader,N. (2012). The “Revolving door”: a profile of acute admissions at a South African Psychiatric Hospital. International Psychiatry Vol 9 (3), 66-68.

Suchman, N., Berg, A., Abrahams, L., Abrahams, T., Adams, A., Cowley, B., DeCosta, C., Hawa, W., Lachman, A., Mpinda, B., Cader-Mokoa, N., Nama, N & Voges, J. (2019). The Mothering from the Inside Out: Adapting an evidence based intervention for high risk mothers in the Western Cape of South Africa. Development and Psychopathology 1-18.