GLOBAL MENTAL HEALTH SUMMIT 2009
Athens, September 2nd, 2009

Inviting your suggestions for the program

The movement for Global Mental Health (www.globalmentalhealth.org) will host the first Global Mental Health Summit on September 2nd 2009 in Athens. The summit is incorporated in the World Federation for Mental Health World Congress for Mental Health to be held from 2 to 6 September 2009 in Athens.This Summit will aim to take stock of the progress made in achieving the call to action of the Lancet series. The Summit will be hosted as part of the World Federation for Mental Health's Biennial Congress (http://www.wmhc2009.com/ static/ index.html).

Organising Principles 

• Members are invited to propose topics and speakers (including themselves)
• The format will be more akin to a ‘caucus’ with short, pithy, presentations, and only one or two invited lectures
• There will be active involvement of all stakeholder groups, in particular users and civil society from low-resource settings

Session 1: Scaling up for mental disorders:
Scaling up of evidence-supported interventions for mental health is a foundational goal of the Movement and its advocacy agenda.  We invite ideas for presentations and speakers that can provide progress updates, research and best practices with respect to furthering this goal.  This could include presentations which take stock of current progress, or obstacles, in scale-up and dissemination, as well as updates, reviews, or discussions about how to address specific challenges to scale-up. We consider "scale-up" to mean the dispersal and wider adoption of proven intervention. Case studies, methodologies, collaborations, and research that capture and address the range operational, political, managerial, scientific, and practical challenges involved in the dissemination and expanded implementation of mental health clinical interventions are of particular interest.  These might include issues such as cost benefit analyses of mental health investments, cross-sector collaboration and alliances that create synergies for advocacy and inclusion of such interventions, creative delivery systems and funding approaches that facilitate expanded use of treatments, levels of scientific proof and support to justify broader use of treatment, community partnerships for advocacy and participatory research, and training and manpower development strategies. 

Organising chair: Gary Belkin, New York University

Session 2: Protecting the human rights of people with mental disorders:
Violations of the rights of persons with mental illness, as well as outright abuse of psychiatry for non-medical purposes, take place in many countries. The abuses cover a wide range of issues and vary from political or economic abuse of psychiatry, to maltreatment of people with mental disorders in prisons, from the absolute lack of quality of life and human rights violations in social care homes and other closed institutions to the use of mental health professionals in developing “effective” means of interrogation and psychological coercion of prisoners. This session provides a forum to discuss issues of mental health and human rights. We invite ideas for presentations and speakers that can provide situation reports, analyses of human rights abuses, progress updates on programs to defend human rights in mental health as well as research and best practices with respect to furthering this goal. The session should stimulate a discussion on issues that are vital elements in upholding ethical standards in mental health care delivery.

Organising chair: Robert van Voren, Global Initiative on Psychiatry

Session 3: Strategies for the future: 
The Movement for Global Mental Health will complete just under a year of its existence on September 2nd, 2009. The Summit will provide the first opportunity for the members of the Movement to meet. This session will explore the impact of the call for action at the level of countries and regions, the linkages between development of sustainable health care systems and mental health, and key milestones and strategies for the Movement in the following 2-3 years.

Organising chair: Vikram Patel, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Participants are invited to propose speakers or topics for any of these sessions by visiting the website of the Movement for Global Mental Health (www.globalmentalhealth.org)

TO REGISTER TO THE SUMMIT, PLEASE USE THE ENCLOSED REGISTRATION FORM OR FOLLOW STEP BY STEP THE ONLINE REGISTRATION SYSTEM.