Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture and Global Mental Health
There are presently no open calls for submissions.
Connection and Community amidst Crisis: Sharing Power and Reimagining Care
As we continue to face unprecedented challenges to science, global health, and equity, diversity, and inclusion, we turn our focus towards strategies to fortify our communities and patients. We seek to highlight organizations and practices that have successfully strengthened and sustained mental healthcare. We welcome submissions that explore the intersection of culture and mental health across diverse settings—from clinical encounters to communities, institutions, and global systems—including research, clinical practice, education, advocacy, and community partnerships. By redoubling our efforts at genuine power-sharing and centering expertise in lived experience, mental health researchers and practitioners have the opportunity to create transformative change.
We invite abstract submitters to consider creative and critical engagements with the conference theme and with other areas of cultural psychiatry and global mental health. Examples of topics and domains related to the conference theme include the following:
Building and Sustaining Systems in Contexts of Crisis
Policy changes in the US are putting healthcare increasingly out of reach for many, while slashed funding and program eliminations have decimated global health efforts. In these contexts, ongoing work to build sustainable systems of care becomes all the more important and challenging. We invite submissions that examine the systems, policies, and structural conditions that shape mental health and access to care. We also invite sessions that explore solutions for mental health financing, community-based care, task sharing, and innovative strategies for sustaining mental health services in unstable funding environments. We welcome submissions on education and supervision in cultural psychiatry and global mental health during challenging times, including cultural humility training, reflective practice, supervision models, and trainee-led initiatives.
Centering Lived Experience: Power and Co-Production in Mental Health
The current moment demands an acceleration of efforts at power-sharing and a broader definition of whose knowledge counts in mental health research, practice, education, and policy. We invite submissions that engage with lived experience leadership, co-production instead of tokenism, epistemic justice, and meaningful power sharing in mental health systems. We also welcome work on decolonizing global mental health curricula and partnerships, local leadership and knowledge sovereignty, the ethics of Global North–South collaborations, and approaches that move beyond simply exporting Global North interventions.
Digital Minds and Human-Centered Innovation
The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including its use in digital mental health, raises important questions about health, mental health care, and human connection across contexts. Some changes bring the potential to increase access and efficiency through AI-enabled screening, clinical training and documentation, and tools that support research productivity. At the same time, there is a need for critical work on algorithmic and cultural bias, privacy, environmental devastation, and the limits of standalone AI-based support. We invite submissions that explore mental health implications of social media use, as well as recent policy changes and legal rulings, such as social media age bans. Other submissions might explore co-production of digital mental health tools and the future of global mental health in virtual and hybrid spaces.
Mental Health in Family Systems and the Perinatal Period
There is growing interest in family systems and perinatal mental health within cultural psychiatry and global mental health. We invite submissions that examine topics such as youth/parent/family co-design, intergenerational care, stepped care and task-sharing approaches in perinatal mental health care, life-course and developmental perspectives, and family therapy and perinatal care in LMICs, conflict-affected settings, and migrant communities. We especially welcome work that centers the voices of children, caregivers, and communities; attends to parent-infant and early childhood relationships; and explores culturally responsive approaches to supporting families navigating trauma, displacement, disability, neurodevelopmental differences, chronic illness, or other complex social and health-related stressors. Submissions may include clinical, community-engaged, prevention-oriented, or systems-level approaches to strengthening relational health and family wellbeing across the perinatal, early childhood, adolescent, and intergenerational life course.
As always, we invite submissions not directly on the conference theme that engage with other topics in cultural psychiatry and global mental health, including (but not limited to) cultural formulation, explanatory models, diagnostic dilemmas, interpreter-mediated care, therapeutic alliance across cultures, and clinical ethics.
Recognizing that many of the conference sub-themes focus on pressing issues and ongoing crises, we invite submitters to think creatively about session topics and structures. In the absence of completed research projects or piloted training programs that are typical of conference presentations, submitters could propose collaborative or flexibly structured session types like roundtables, discussion-driven workshops, or wellbeing-focused and community-building activities. These submission types could use the Workshop submission category.
We also encourage the full range of contribution types that have always made SSPC conferences an engaging interdisciplinary space, including empirical research, clinical case discussions, cultural formulation work, educational innovations, reflective practice, humanities/narrative approaches, community-engaged scholarship, and lived experience perspectives.