IACAPAP President's Message Sep 2026

Hello and Salam!

It feels quite surreal to be writing to you as President of an organization that has been my work home for almost 18 years. IACAPAP feels like a large, dedicated family — scattered across time zones, arguing affectionately about diagnostic categories, united by the same stubborn belief that children everywhere deserve better mental health care. I'm grateful to be part of it, and even more grateful to be trusted with this role.

Before anything else, I want to thank the outgoing Bureau. It's easy to point to what's visible — the MOU with the SNF Global Center at CMI, the regional lunch and learn webinars, the bulletin columns that gave younger members a real voice, the partnership with the Lancet ADHD series, and many more firsts. But what doesn’t get discerned and applauded is the immense dedication behind the scenes: the long email threads, the multitude of decisions made without fanfare, the meetings that run late because someone cared enough to get it right, the early mornings and late night calls because time zones never comply. That's the work nobody writes a column about, and it's the work that actually holds an organization like ours together.

I am joined for the next four years by an incredibly erudite bureau; Andres Martin as Treasurer, David Coghill as Secretary-General and Luis Rohde as Past President. You’ll hear me talking more about them over the next few communications, as I introduce them, their life, their work and their hopes for the next four years at IACAPAP.  I also want to thank Sue, our Executive Officer; so much of what makes IACAPAP function — the details, the follow-through, the quiet holding-together of things while the rest of us come and go with our terms — happens because of her. Bureaus change. Sue is the constant, and we're lucky for it.

And beyond the Bureau and the Secretariat, I keep thinking of the many clinicians, researchers, and trainees around the world who volunteer their time to this work — running our programs, teaching, translating, showing up to committees after a full day of seeing patients, because they believe it matters. We are grateful for your efforts.

Whatever we manage to do over the coming years will be built on ground laid by those that came before us. So, thank you, truly.

We have a wonderful team to look ahead to the next four years. I won't use the rest of this first column to lay out a grand plan with timelines and deliverables — you'll get plenty of that in more formal updates. Instead, here's what I'm curious about and excited to work on, and wish to extend an invitation for you to tell me what may be on your mind.

I think a lot about our young professionals. So many brilliant early-career people drift away simply because there weren’t visible pathways discernible early enough, and I'd love a trainee in their first year to feel as welcome at IACAPAP as someone who's been coming to congresses for decades. We look forward to bringing you more visible ways to get involved, more organized engagement with programs that carry your voice.

I'm also thinking about how we talk to each other, and to more of us. Our communication team, led by Dr Hesham Hamoda, has done some brilliant work over the past couple of Bureaus — the newsletter, the media presence, the growing visibility of IACAPAP don't happen by accident. What we’d love to build upon is your voice: our younger members telling us how they want to be reached, what they wish to hear, how we could advocate and use our voice for our children and youth, and where we could disrupt.

Then there's our member organizations. IACAPAP is really a federation of communities, and we want to spend real time listening to what's happening in yours — what's working, what you're struggling with, what you wish the international body understood better, and what you wish to share.

A quieter, yet steady hope of ours is that we grow into a teaching, learning and knowledge-generating home, where training, mentorship, and research feel connected into initiatives that talk to each other. This one will take time, and we look forward to building it slowly and with deep intentionality.

And yes, fundraising — unglamorous maybe but necessary, so all of the above can actually happen rather than just sound nice in a newsletter.

None of this is a promise of transformation. Organizations like ours change deliberately, in small honest increments, usually because a lot of people quietly did their bit, and we will continue the scaffolding. My hope is that by the end of this term, IACAPAP feels a little more connected, a little more welcoming, and a little more like the community we already are at our best.

More soon — and please, write back. We look forward to always hearing from you. .

IACAPAP Bulletin, Issue 83