Strengthening cultural psychiatry through community engagement, social connection, and interprofessional collaboration 

With this theme, we draw attention to community-based, peer support, and other approaches in cultural psychiatry that promote patients’ social well-being. Cultural psychiatry is founded on the premise that communities and individuals with lived experiences are the experts in their concerns and care, highlighting the importance of engaging service users and support networks to promote healing. 

Further, we deeply value our roots and traditions as an organization of cultural psychiatrists, while also aspiring to make our interdisciplinary community inclusive and welcoming to psychologists, licensed professional counselors, nurse practitioners, anthropologists, sociologists, and those of other training backgrounds who identify with the values of cultural psychiatry and global mental health. We are eager to highlight our diverse roles—as mental health providers, researchers, educators, junior and senior faculty, and trainees—and learn how our community is tackling the challenges we face today. 

By focusing on collaboration, community engagement, and integrating diverse perspectives within cultural psychiatry, we will use this Annual Meeting to create a vibrant space for dialogue and learning. 

For our 2024 conference, we invite you to draw broadly from your research, scholarship, clinical practices, and personal histories to tell your story and share your approaches to building community. 

One day of the conference will be a joint conference day with the Hong Fook Mental Health Association, the leading ethno-cultural community mental health agency serving Asian and other communities in the Greater Toronto Area. Hong Fook provides a continuum of mental health services covering the spectrum from “promoting wellness” to “managing illness” in Cambodian, Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Korean, Vietnamese, and English. This joint day allows researchers and practitioners to discuss cross-cutting interests and utilize a cultural humility stance to improve care for Asian communities across borders.

Thematic Domains for Submission

Examples of topics and domains related to the conference theme include the following:

• Community-based approaches to mental health: Submissions in this area will discuss successful community-driven initiatives that have effectively integrated cultural psychiatry principles into mental health care. Examples may include working with community navigators and lay health workers to support the mental health of post-migration individuals and families, examination of psychosocial interventions targeting social determinants of mental health, and interventions that are delivered in the natural environment where people live and work, including homes, schools, workplaces, or places of worship, rather than in clinical settings.
• Navigating interprofessional cultures to enhance patient care and promote justice: Submissions in this area will explore how interprofessional collaboration contributes to better understanding and addressing cultural factors that influence mental health, and/or how interprofessional collaboration contributes to dismantling structural barriers to equity in mental health care
• Decolonizing mental health: Illustrating methods or practices that challenge Western-centric paradigms. Submissions in this area could include centering indigenous knowledge and traditional healing, empowering local communities, fostering greater collaboration between disciplines, deconstructing stigmatizing labels or diagnostic categories, advocating for representation within the mental health field, or addressing historical trauma in training and treatment. 
• Research collaborations and approaches for culturally-centered healing: Presentations in this area will explore how researchers from different backgrounds can collaborate to develop and test culturally sensitive interventions. This could include sharing examples of successful interdisciplinary research projects, the discussion of community-based participatory research, and other novel methodologies to better meet the needs of groups impacted by mental health disparities. 
• Lived experience, peer support, and collaborative healing: Submissions will highlight the importance of involving individuals with lived experience in shaping mental health care services, and consider how professionals and service users can collaborate to co-design healing approaches
• Promoting social well-being: Submissions in this topic area may explore social isolation and loneliness as a cultural explanatory model for distress, and discuss centering the promotion of social connection as a key treatment goal. 
• Training and education in cultural psychiatry and mental health: Submissions in this area will share innovative approaches to training future mental health professionals in cultural psychiatry, and discuss how diverse disciplines can collaborate to develop comprehensive and decolonized training programs

See the full text of the Call for Abstracts here

Deadline for submissions: December 15th, 2023