IACAPAP President's Message Sep 2025

I invite you for a quick immersion on what has been done at IACAPAP since our previous Bulletin was published.  

Our Executive Committee (EC) had our annual meeting in a hybrid format during the International Congress of the European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Strasbourg last July. In a daylong session, members had a comprehensive discussion on all initiatives currently conducted by our Association, exploring opportunities and exchanging suggestions to improve our functioning. I would like to call your attention to some issues. First, as you are reading this bulletin, we will have just finished our Helmut Remschmidt Research Seminar in Germany lead by Professors Petrus J de Vries and Christina Schwenck and an amazing group of almost 25 fellows from several countries. Second, the nomination process for the next EC is already open. We encourage you to submit your suggestions and applications. Finally, we will be accepting applications for the Donald J. Cohen Fellowship Program up to October 23rd , 2025. Do not lose the chance to apply and be part of a community of more than 400 fellows who have already been trained in this program!         

Regarding our next World Congress in 2026, the first good news is that its website is live. While we want to thank our colleagues for the growing number of early bird registration, we should remind you to submit your symposium proposals by October 30th, 2025. We expect to have a very scientifically robust program embracing evidence-based, innovative and diverse topics on CAMH. The first keynote speakers are being invited, and the initial speakers’ line-up is already on our website. Many more will join in the next few months.     

Regarding the two areas of collaboration between IACAPAP and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute:    

• SNF Global Center Clinical Fellowship Program for Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs):  While everything is progressing well with our first two cohorts of Mozambican fellows, we were able to finish the selection process for the third and last group of fellows from this country to begin their training in Brazil in 2026.  This last group is made up of mental health professionals from Beira, located in the center of the country.  Thus, we will have soon three teams of professionals to provide care and disseminate knowledge on CAMH in Mozambique. Peter Raucci, Program Director of Fellowships at the SNF Global Center, and Ayesha Mian, representing IACAPAP, are working to finalize agreements for the first cohort of Kenyan fellows beginning their training in South Africa in 2026. Other potential pairs of countries from South America, Asia, Oceania and Eastern Europe are being analyzed.  
• SNF Global Center Item Bank – A Free Assessment Tool to Support Culturally Appropriate Global Data Collection for Child and Adolescent Mental Health: The psychometric evaluation phase continues to progress. The more recent development was an extensive cocreation process for the tool’s branding and visual identity, led by a professional company and involving experts and youths with lived experience.  During the next month, a list of potential names will be shared with the scientific community who collaborated in the first phases of its development, IACAPAP members, and youth with lived experience for voting.  In the meantime, we encourage you to read more about this work on the SNF Global Center’s newly revamped website here.  

We are still waiting for a decision from WHO-EM committee about our appeal document to include methylphenidate in the WHO Essential Medicines List, led by Professors Brooke Molina and Philip Shaw. As mentioned in the last bulletin, the final decision was expected in July. Let´s keep our fingers crossed!  

A five member committee, a collaboration of WPA, IACAPAP and CMI, has been working on the conceptualisation of a Global Child Mental Health curriculum, initially with a psychiatric focus. The committee meets monthly; the initial work was centered on building a literature resource, and now the development of a short survey is underway to assess broad stakeholder input on priority areas as pertaining to curricular development. The committee is chaired by Ayesha Mian (Pakistan), and comprises of Flavio Dias Silva (Brazil), Zheala Qayyum (United States), Ramya Mohan (United Kingdom) and David Cawthorpe (Canada). 

Our ante-penultimate paragraph is always dedicated to calling your attention to an impactful paper recently published on CAMH in scientific literature. This time, I would like to highlight something different, not specifically for CAMH but that certainly will affect our field. The paper was published in a free online preprint archive for scholarly articles last July. Thus, it was not yet peer reviewed. The study was developed by authors linked to Microsoft. Basically, they compared the performance of a group of expert medical doctors against a group of different AIs each with a determined function (clinical diagnosis, request exams, assess costs of treatment). All of them moderated by another AI from Microsoft called MAI-DXO. The challenge: 304 complex medical cases from the New England Medical Journal. Findings: The AI got 85.5% of the diagnoses correctly compared to 20% of the medical expert group. This performance was accompanied by a reduction of 70% on the costs of the exams requested. Although this paper can be seen from different angles, undoubtedly it makes us think about the role of health professionals, including us as mental health professionals, in the future. Probably, one thing that is core for CAMH professionals, establishing positive human relations with our patients and their families, will be the most valuable asset for health professionals in the near future, helping in deliberative decisions with our patients and families using data generated no more from health professionals but from AI. Time will tell!      

Finally, regarding the auditable proposed goals in the previous bulletin, they have been partially achieved since:   

1. The web page for our World Congress is live. 
2. The Helmut Remschmidt Research Seminar was successfully completed. 
3. We are still finalizing the documents for beginning the program in South Africa for the Kenyan fellows and we do not yet have a date for launching the program in the first trimester of 2026. 
4. We already have a list of 2-3 pair of countries, and we are assessing formal and logistical arrangements to select one of them to be the third pair of countries of the SNF Global Center Clinical Fellowship Program for Low- and Middle-Income Countries. 
5. We kept moving the progress for the psychometric assessment of the SNF Global Center item bank and we are finalizing the process to select naming and visual identity of the instrument. 

Our auditable goals up to the next bulletin are: 

1. Have, up to the next bulletin, a line-up with at least 10 key-note speakers from diverse countries and cultures for our World Congress in Germany who should be able to present relevant, evidence-based, innovative, and provocative CAMH data.
2. Have our fellows for the Donald Cohen Fellowship Program selected.
3. Have both a MOU signed among IACAPAP, SNF Global Center and the partners from Kenya and South Africa to have our second pair of countries onboard for the SNF Global Center Clinical Fellowship Program for Low- and Middle-Income Countries and a date for beginning the program in 2026.
4. Have another pair of countries defined for the SNF Global Center Clinical Fellowship Program for Low- and Middle-Income Countries.
5. Continue the process of psychometric validation of the SNF Global Center item bank and have a name for it, as well as some options for visual identity.  

I hope you all enjoy reading our Bulletin.  

IACAPAP Bulletin, Issue 79