When good things happen, it is important for them to be noticed and not submerged in the hurly-burly of daily activity. So here is some good news:
- - The Jamaica Psychiatric Society and the Libyan Association of Psychiatry, Neurology and Neurosurgery are much welcomed as new ad hoc Member Societies, and the World Fellowship for Schizophrenia and Allied Disorders is a new ad hoc Affiliated Association.
- - WPA News has changed its format and is now more colourful and substantial. Each region of the world has been featured in four recent issues, giving prominence to the huge amount of good work being done by the 18 Zonal Representatives.
- - The Secretariat in Geneva is now staffed by our increasingly experienced administrators: Anna Engstrom from Sweden and Pamela Atiase from Switzerland/Ghana. The excellent suite of offices is to be further extended by our helpful hosts (Geneva University Hospitals) to include an additional office, cloakroom and kitchenette.
- - The recent WPA Regional Meetings in Lima, Nairobi and Seoul have been characterised by strong regional commitment. The African Association of Psychiatrists and Allied Professionals (AAPAP) masterminded our first WPA Regional Meeting in sub-Saharan Africa. The meeting probably relaunched the African Journal of Psychiatry, and the commitment and vitality (including rhythm and dance) of the region were truly infectious.
- - Your Secretary General was an invited speaker at a smaller co-sponsored meeting in Beirut. The presentations from Iraqi colleagues were poignant, and their links with psychiatrists in the area and across the world were tangibly appreciated.
- - The new Section on Psychiatry in Developing Countries got off to a flying start in Lahore, where the launch of the South Asian Federation of Psychiatric Associations occurred - further evidence of growing regional coordination of WPA, facilitated by the impact of global communication systems but also thriving on direct personal contact.
- - During the past year, I have had the privilege to chair the European Task Force, which brings together the WPA, the World Health Organization (Europe), the European Union of Medical Specialists (UEMS), as well as the Association of European Psychiatrists (AEP). The growing confidence of European psychiatry was visible at the leaders meeting in Madrid, despite large differences in human resource. The core debate about the role of psychiatrists in public mental health continued and the need for more specific training recognised; yet rightly Prof. Maj pointed out that there is a risk of overlooking our central responsibilities to prevent and manage mental disorders.
- - The prime task of the Secretariat is to be a communication channel for this world network of member associations. It is our intention to improve further this process by the website management moving to Geneva, with a substantial debt to the pioneering work of Roger Montenegro in Buenos Aires.
- - The WPA General Survey will be distributed in Autumn and provide the various WPA components with a vital opportunity to express their opinions about what WPA does well, as well as where and how improvements to our organisation can occur. In particular, we will seek opinions about the usefulness of paper mailings, and it is likely that the content of all present paper mailings will in future be on the website.
- - In addition to this institutional work, I am grateful to colleagues across the world, who challenge and sustain my persisting academic and clinical interest in perinatal and transcultural psychiatry as well as medical ethics. There is a myth that WPA thinking is dominated by psychopharmacology. This
- subject is of course important, but the emphasis on explanatory pluralism in WPA is what I have found so refreshing in much of the work that we undertake.
- - The new Section on Perinatal Psychiatry and Infant Mental Health, as well as the new Institutional Programme on Parental and Infant Mental Health (co-chaired with Sam Tyano), are both launched. They will provide a much-needed focus for the scientific work in this field, which so often is overlooked by maternal child health and children's services.
WPA at its best is like a scaffold that provides a structure within which Member Societies (small and large) can thrive, so that knowledge and clinical experience are exchanged.
Over the next twelve months, I hope that the Secretariat in Geneva will increasingly facilitate this work and that the most up-to-date communication systems will soon be in place. In this way our organisation, which has limited financial resources and yet ambitious values, will become stronger, with more social as well as financial capital. The challenges for the organisation are considerable, but I do not detect any faltering of the will to succeed.
It is much to be hoped that the larger Member Societies as stiffeners, including my own College, as well as those with smaller budgets, will increasingly recognise the opportunity to facilitate international educational exchange, and promote strategies for conflict resolution and the provision of psychiatric expertise to communities traumatised by violence and war.