Newsletter January 2024
Dear members of the WACP, Dear colleagues interested in Cultural Psychiatry, This is the first of its kind: A newsletter of the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry. A lot happens within our community, we are thriving (1), and it is about time that we inform each other about what is going on. With this new initiative, a newsletter, we want to come closer to each other, and, to be better informed about our cherished field of cultural psychiatry. We also want to increase our members, so please send this newsletter to at least one other colleague of yours who you think might be interested. This is a pilot edition of our newsletter. It is a complete edition intended as a test/teaser, before publication really starts with our official first issue planned for January next year. We will ask our social media group to have a look at this newsletter and improve it if needed. Please feel free to send me any comment or any news you want to share with us or anything else you would like to add to this cultural psychiatric newsletter. Ideas are more than welcome (mario.braakman@outlook.com).
Mario H Braakman, President WACP
News
Update website
Our website https://waculturalpsy.org/ needs an update. We allocated funds to redesign our main website and we let you know the launch date a.s.a.p.
Transcultural psychiatry
After 32 years of active service as Editor-in-Chief of ‘our’ top-journal Transcultural Psychiatry, Laurence Kirmayer (till recently one of our board members) stepped down. He contributed immensely to ‘building the foundation for a culturally responsive psychiatry’. We are deeply grateful for his dedication. We wish his successor Dr. G. Eric Jarvis all the best in his new role.
Special Interest Groups (SIG’s)
We were happy that our past-president Roberto Lewis-Fernandez was willing tocoordinate and stimulate SIG-activities. SIG’s are our Special Interest Groups and we will introduce them to you in the next newsletters. We purchased a ZOOM- account in order to enable the SIG’s to organize webinars. In the recurring SIG-section of the newsletter you will find information, updates and plans for webinars etc. of our SIG’s.
Renato D. Alarcón
One of our prominent members and former WACP Officer and treasurer, Prof. Dr. Renato Alarcon, emeritus professor of Psychiatry at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, will deliver
the prestigious Distinguished Psychiatrist Lecture by Presidential invitation during the next annual APA-meeting in New York, May 4-8, 2024.
There is much more to say but we don’t want to overload you with news in this pilot-issue.
International conference
We as WACP decided to introduce a new initiative: the International Conference. In between our large congresses, these are 3 years apart from each other, we thought it
would be a good idea to have an additional scientific gathering, smaller but as inspiring as the large congress.The first one was planned in Shanghai, China but very unfortunately, due to COVID, we had to cancel it. However, now we are heading towards the next international conference and it will be planned in the second part of 2024. It will happen in Paris, and the theme will be CULTURAL PSYCHIATRY & ART. Alberto Velasco and his SIG is very active in organizing this and he is planning online seminars in preparation for that event.
In our first official newsletter in January we will inform you about all the details. Please join us and also come to Paris for this very special conference. Alberto Velasco is cooperating with colleagues from two other organizations: GHU Paris psychiatry and neurosciences (GHU Paris) and France Latin America Coordination of Psychiatry (COFALP).
7th World Congress of Cultural Psychiatry
Our colleague and member of our Board of Directors, Dr Itsuo Asai (and his team) is very busy with the preparations of our next World Congress. We will pay much more attention to this big event in the near future. For now save the date: we will meet in Tokyo in the last week of September 2025. The Pacific Rim Psychiatrists (https://www.prcp.org/ will join us and we will organize the congress together.
