WPA Scientific Sections: a strengthened backbone for the 2020‐2023 triennium

At the beginning of his six‐year term, the WPA Secretary for Scientific Sections laid out a work plan ¹ comprised of the following main goals: a) improve and streamline communication between the Sections and facilitate research and publication projects; b) continue and expand the WPA's intersectional activities; c) leverage the Sections' experiences and resources to further WPA's activities for early career psychiatrists; d) promote gender equity at all levels of Sections and their activities; e) establish cross‐country peer networks of researchers to facilitate and share access to knowledge, resources and strategies to publish successfully; and f) establish truly authentic and compassionate relationships with organizations representing patients and caregivers.

The implementation of these goals is meant to strengthen the Sections as the backbone of the Association and thus to enable the WPA to forcefully fulfill its triennial Action Plans, to swiftly react to challenges to global psychiatry, and to communicate its mission not only to the psychiatric community but to society at large.

Since a powerful information technology infrastructure is a prerequisite for an umbrella association of 140 national psychiatric societies to meet the demands of today's world, the Secretary for Sections has established a flexible online meeting platform in order to communicate with the Sections, and for the Sections to communicate with each other. For the past two years now, the Secretary has held online videoconferences with the leaderships of the various Sections about every three months. Participation ranges from 10 to 30 Sections. The time slots are rotated so as to accommodate for different time zones, regional and religious holidays.

While being a simple tool, the introduction of this platform has tremendously propelled cross‐talk between Sections. It has been instrumental in increasing the number of intersectional activities at WPA congresses and meetings, such as symposia, workshops, and panel discussions. It has furthermore contributed to a more prominent role of the Sections in the program committees of the WPA's signature World Congress of Psychiatry, with Section members now making up more than a third of program committee members, being balanced for geographic diversity.

This heightened visibility and level of engagement of the Sections has greatly contributed to the shaping of a novel signature initiative of the WPA: the Education, Science, Publication, and Research Initiative (ESPRI) ² . ESPRI is dedicated to jump‐starting innovative and promising programs in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMIC). The WPA will award $15,000 USD to three projects ($5,000 USD per project) per year. These funds should be matched with funds that the applicants have been able to secure through other na‐tional and/or international organizations, including academia, governments, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) and/or industry.

The first project to be awarded seed funding through the ESPRI mechanism, which was jointly developed with the Secretaries for Education and Publications, focuses on training mental health professionals in diagnosis and reporting of trauma related to torture and persecution in people from Syria and other countries of the Middle East and North Africa region. This project is being spearheaded by the Section on Psychological Consequences of Torture and Persecution.

This Section, in close collaboration with that on Psychotherapy, was furthermore instrumental in bringing a strong WPA component and thinking to a conference on psychotraumatology at the University of Duhok, Kurdistan (June 23‐24, 2019), which in turn inspired a publication collaboration between the WPA and the British Journal of Psychiatry, resulting in a special issue on “Bringing the toll of disasters and trauma on mental health to the forefront of psychiatric discussion” ³ .

The beginning of the next WPA triennium (2020‐2023) will be marked by a thematic congress on “Psychological trauma: global burden on mental and physical health”, taking place in Athens on December 11‐13, 2020, conceptualized as an entirely intersectional meeting (www.wpathematic.org).

The interaction between the Secretary and the Early Career Psychiatrists (ECP) Section has proven to be very fruitful, and has helped shape a signature ECP project, the ECP Exchange Programme, which will allow early career psychiatrists to acquire intercultural competencies, and gain awareness of different expressions of illnesses and available treatments across the world ⁴ . The Secretary is now working together with ECP members to actively contribute to and shape WPA's social media presence. The Section on History of Psychiatry has recently seen a major influx of early career psychiatrists and has become a very active and diverse Section under a new leadership, demonstrating that the history of our field is a dynamic process.

In addition to the ones discussed above, the Secretary would like to briefly point the reader to the recent activities (e.g., large‐scale book projects, development of guide‐lines, congresses, active involvement with various NGOs) of the Sections on Disaster Psychiatry; Evidence‐based Psychiatry; Exercise and Sports Psychiatry; Family Research and Intervention; Immunology and Psychiatry; Interdisciplinary Collaboration; Medicine, Psychiatry and Primary Care; Neuroimaging in Psychiatry; Old Age Psychiatry; Pharmacopsychiatry; Philosophy and Humanities; Positive Psychiatry; Preventive Psychiatry; Stigma and Mental Illness; Urban Mental Health; and Women's Mental Health.

The COVID‐19 pandemic has proven to be a major challenge to psychiatrists and psychiatric services around the globe, underscoring WPA's role for guidance in these trying times ⁵ . The WPA has risen to the occasion and launched a web resource providing important information to mental health specialists worldwide, which is continuously updated and offers latest state‐of‐the art educational material in various languages (www.wpanet.org/covid‐19‐resources). Sections have been crucial in gathering, collating, reviewing and adapting the various pieces of information.

The ongoing implementation of new, powerful information technology infrastructure, with a newly designed web pres‐ence, will greatly benefit the Sections' active participation in WPA's educational and research activities over the next triennium. Sections are encouraged to share their work with the mental health community on WPA's news section on its website (www.wpanet.org/news).

The Secretary's focus over the next three years will lie in making sure that Sections are at the forefront of bringing diversity to the everyday work of WPA. Furthermore, helping members from Sections, in particular from LMIC, to be actively involved in research projects and grant applications will be another major objective of the Secretary's agenda. Finally, the Sections will be encouraged to dedicate a major part of their work to the integration of service users and carers ⁶ .

In summary, over the past three years, the WPA Scientific Sections have shown that they are essential to implementing WPA's Action Plan ⁷ ; that they are the glue between clinicians, researchers and policy makers; and that they continuously strengthen the bond that connects psychiatrists from every corner of the world to each other and to our common goal, that is promoting mental health and well‐being as a human right8, 9.