IACAPAP President's Message Jun 2026

Dear colleagues,

We are on the verge of our IACAPAP World Congress on Child and Adolescent Mental Health and we are confident that it will be an unforgettable event. At the same time, this will be my last column as president of our association. For this reason, the format will be different from previous ones. I want to revisit the goals set in our first column with you and see what we accomplished during our term.

However, before beginning this journey, I want to thank you very much for the opportunity to serve as president of IACAPAP. It was an honor! At the same time, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Yewande, our secretary-general, Carmen, our treasurer, and Daniel, our past president, for accepting to be part of the IACAPAP bureau. As said, in my first column: “We all know that the magnitude of the challenges inherent to an association with tradition and representativeness as ours can only be faced by teamwork.” Talking about teamwork, it is very important to highlight that IACAPAP does not exist without the extremely competent work by our executive officer, Sue Wong. My gratitude also to Sue. It was a real privilege to work with all members of the Bureau and Sue!

The goals set at the beginning of the term were: a) develop more educational initiatives for CAMH professionals from Low-Middle Income Countries (LMIC); b) stimulate the engagement of a new generation of Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) professionals identified with IACAPAP values and mission; c) work to regain a more expressive and active participation of the key-leaders in the field of CAMH in IACAPAP; d) achieve financial stability for our Association; e) increase the active participation of national associations in the construction of an even more solid Association.

a)     More educational initiatives for CAMH professionals from Low-Middle Income Countries

Thanks to the work of Yewande, our secretary general, we expanded our educational platform creating regional webinars, open-access webinars, and we make public available webinar recordings through a partnership with Vumedi. Relying on this partnership, we will also make several sessions of the IACAPAP World Congress public and open access after the meeting.

A special thanks here also to Hee Jeong, John-Joe, Uttara and Valsamma, our E-textbook editors-in-chief, for having the first edition of the Textbook version 2.0 ready for the IACAPAP World Congress. This is one of the most accessed open-access reference sources in CAMH worldwide, especially relevant for LMIC professionals. 

Under the umbrella of educational initiatives, I want also to mention the clinical fellowship for LMICs in partnership with SNF Global Center for CAMH at CMI and development of a global essential curriculum for Child and Adolescent Psychiatric training in partnership with World Psychiatric Association (WPA) Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Section among other institutions. These two initiatives will be addressed below.       

b)     Engagement of a new generation of CAMH professionals

Clearly, we are seeing a much higher interest from young CAMH professionals in IACAPAP. The numbers can tell you the story! We had respectively 23 and 25 candidates for our last HRRS and DJCFP. The number of poster and oral submissions for our IACAPAP World Congress was impressive and these activities are typically the space for young professionals in congresses like ours.  The Early Career Group is extremely active and has two new coordinators - Andrés Román-Jarrín from Ecuador and Charlene Gumbo from Kenya.

c)     Key-leaders in the field of CAMH again as part of IACAPAP

Undoubtedly, IACAPAP returned to the center of the CAMH arena globally.  We established partnerships like the one with Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center for Child And Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute (CMI) that has the potential of making an extreme impact in the field (see below), we have collaborated with Orygen in preparing the WHO research priorities on digital environments and youth mental health, half of the bureau is working on a Lancet Psychiatry series on ADHD. Just to cite some initiatives! Important to mention that it has been a long time since we have seen so many candidates for the next IACAPAP bureau, and many of them from very respected university centers. 

d)     IACAPAP Financial stability

Thanks to the work done by Carmen, our treasurer, and a very austere vision on how to spend financial resources in our term, IACAPAP is now more financially solid than 4 years ago. This was achieved even without considering the revenues from the current IACAPAP World Congress. However, the journey is just partially completed here. The vision is to have enough resources in our account to 1) increase the number of CAMH educational initiatives; 2) cover expenses of a future IACAPAP World Congress that could be financially unsuccessful. Since this is unlikely, why is it important? Because with this level of financial security, we can make much more equitable deals with Professional Congress Organizers (i.e., now to assume the total financial risk, they request an expressive amount of the surplus our congresses). This will be a challenge for the next bureau in terms of innovative solutions. Some that we have tried, like crowdfunding mechanisms for donations, did not work as expected.

To secure the financial stability of IACAPAP, we needed to be very austere even with programs that are the soul of our association like the Helmut Remschmidt Research Seminar (HRRS) and Donald J Cohen Fellowship Program (DJCFP). A special thanks to Christina and Petrus for their splendid work with HRRS in São Paulo and Kloster Irsee, and to Ayesha, Naoufel, Sowmya and Jordan for organizing vibrant DJCFP meetings during our congresses in Brazil and Germany, despite these restrictions.

e)     Increase active participation of national associations in IACAPAP

Several initiatives led by Yewande and Hesham, the chair of our communication team, were implemented to facilitate and increase participation of our national and individual members in IACAPAP.  The creation of new Specific Interest Groups, the Allied Professionals Think Tank and the introduction of member-focused initiatives such as the “Full Member Corner” represent examples of initiatives to dynamize active participations of our members inside IACAPAP. Communication with members also became more active through newsletters, webinars, and social media updates. To have an idea of the comprehensiveness of the work led by Hesham and its impact on CAMH, please see a recent paper by our communication team at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42177526/

f)     Other relevant initiatives

In our term, we also achieved an important strategic goal. For the first time, we had our Professional Congress Organizer (PCO), CPO Hanser. This has been an aspiration of IACAPAP for so many years.  We signed a short contract to avoid imposing our decision on the next Bureau and to see how we were going to work together. Based on the experience of these first years and the one preparing for the Congress in Hamburg, I can say without any hesitation how different and better is to count on an extremely professional team like the one working in CPO Hanser. In addition, only those that organize congresses know that it is such a relief to count on a PCO that assumes all financial risks in an era where more and more people take decisions, like registering in meetings, at the last minute.

Another important initiative led by Ayesha, our IACAPAP councilor, is the development of an essential curriculum for Child and Adolescent Psychiatric (CAP) training jointly with the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Section and other associations. The work is in its first steps but the dream of having an essential curriculum for CAP endorsed by a huge number of national and regional associations and by IACAPAP and WPA-CAP is something difficult to achieve considering global diversity, but extremely valuable to pursue.      

g)     Relevant legacies of our term to CAMH community

I left the “frosting on the cake” for the end. I think the most relevant legacies from our term for the CAMH community were accomplished by the partnership signed through a MOU with the SNF Global Center for CAMH at CMI. They were: The creation of the LUMI (Library of Universal Mental Health Instruments) and the Clinical fellowships for LMICs. Thus, I am extremely grateful to SNF Global Center for trusting IACAPAP in establishing this partnership.

I have been presenting data on the LUMI in previous columns. In short, LUMI represents the dream of having a common language in CAMH globally coming through. A library of instruments that are open access, psychometric validated, tuned for different cultures, co-created with more than 300 international experts and with people with lived experience, available in more than 10 languages and ready for clinical and research use in CAMH. LUMI assesses mental health categorically and dimensionally, risk and protective factors and the youth´s care journey allowing perspectives from different information sources.  Everything is presented on a friendly web platform. The launch will be in New York during the SNF Global Youth Summit next September, but we will have a special symposium in the IACAPAP World Congress dedicated to introducing LUMI to you. We are confident that this will substantially impact our field positively.

I have also been presenting the Clinical Fellowship Program for LMICs in previous columns. To directly address the shortage of CAMH professionals in LMICs, we and SNF Global Center launched a comprehensive Clinical Fellowship Program in CAMH. Mozambique, a nation with only one practicing Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist up to 2024 and a dearth of trained CAMH professionals, was selected as the inaugural site. This program extends beyond psychiatrists to include psychologists and occupational therapists, embodying a holistic approach to CAMH care, consonant to the IACAPAP vision. The fellowship spans two years, with the first year dedicated to intensive training in Brazil, followed by one year of service in Mozambique's public health system, under continuous external supervision. This ambitious endeavor aims to build a sustainable model of CAMH training and care for LMICs. One cohort of professionals completed the entire program; one already completed the first year of the program in Brazil and they are in the second year in Mozambique and the third is on their first year of training in Brazil. The program was already expanded to another pair of countries – Kenya and South Africa as the host country. Just to give a glimpse of the potential of a program like this one, the first group trained on CAMH in Brazil (one psychiatrist, one psychologist and one occupational therapist) was able to help providing MH care to about 1000 children and adolescents in Maputo, provided 160 inter-consultations and built capacity among health care professionals through daily lectures in their first year of return to Mozambique (2025).    

I would like to end this last column wishing all the best and a huge success for the next bureau. Here, I would also want to recognize the magnificant work by Daniel, our past president, in leading a competent nominating committee. For sure, the new Bureau will have many challenges to face, but they will certainly find it to be an extremely rewarding task!

As usual, I hope you enjoy reading our Bulletin!

IACAPAP Bulletin, Issue 82