Grupo Latino Americano de Estudios Transculturales, A.C.

Welcome

The Organizing Committee of GLADET’s Third International Congress welcomes all of you to our most important event. The first GLADET Congress took place in Guadalajara, Jalisco, from April 17th to April 20th 2008, with the theme “Psychiatry, Nature, and Culture: from the individual to the universal”, and featured contributions by distinguished colleagues from five continents. The memoirs of that Congress became a fundamental text for contemporary psychiatry in Latin America. GLADET’s Second International Congress was held in the beautiful city of Cuzco, in Peru, from August 28 to August 30 2010, together with the Twenty-First Peruvian National Congress of Psychiatry. Seeking to address the issues of violence and migration from a cultural psychiatry approach, we have invited to this Third Congress an outstanding group of specialists from different parts of the world who will meet at the Camino Real Hotel of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, from August 9 through August 11 2011.

Tuxtla Gutiérrez is the capital city of the state of Chiapas, with a population of almost 600,000 inhabitants. It enjoys a pleasant tropical weather in August. The city was founded by Zoque Indians who named it Coyatoc, “land, house, or place of rabbits”. Between 1486 and 1505 the Aztecs invaded the region, destroyed Coyatoc, and named the place Tuchtlán. During the three centuries of the Spanish Colony, the town was a rest stop for travelers before arriving to Chiapa de los Indios, as well as a crossroads for traders from Oaxaca, Veracruz, Tabasco, Campeche, and Guatemala. We have chosen a beautiful scarlet macaw in flight as an image to promote this event. It is worth mentioning that the quetzal, a bird of a closely related species, is the emblematic bird of the neighboring country of Guatemala. Participants in this Congress will see that the scarlet macaw’s open tricolor wings express a brotherly hug and the wish to share with you the clear air of Chiapas. It also poses the question about the life in other lands of the many Latin Americans who have migrated to other parts of the world. The air, the land, the waters, the climate, nature as a whole have a decisive importance in the symbolic creations of Latin American culture. We must inquire into what happens to the symbolic elements of the culture of our migrants, what their uses are among groups with an ethnic identity, how they are integrated or rejected by the cultures into which they arrive, and to what extent they are factors of integration or causes for shame that may respectively be displayed or concealed, with the consequences for mental health that these dynamics may have on the relationship between the individual and society. Cultural psychiatry has a lot to offer to this debate, and our Congress will give us an excellent opportunity for a scientific encounter of the highest level. Welcome!

GLADET

The First World Psychiatry Congress, organized by Henry Ey, was held in Paris in 1950. On that occasion, European and North-American psychiatrists were able to appreciate their developments and achievements. At the same time, Latin American psychiatrists who attended realized that there were huge differences between the issues discussed at the Congress and the problems they encountered in their everyday practice.

A year later, Doctors José Antonio Bustamante (from Cuba), Guillermo Dávila (from Mexico) and Carlos Alberto Seguín (from Peru), met in Jalapa, Mexico, in order to create the Latin American Group of Transcultural Studies (GLADET – Grupo Latinoamericano de Estudios Transculturales). During the following ten years, they discussed how to address the issues raised at the First World Congress. In 1960 Drs. Seguín, Dávila, Bermann, Pacheco e Silva, Mata de Gregorio and Bustamante met in Havana and decided to hold the First Congress of the Latin American Association of Psychiatry (APAL) in Caracas in 1961. This event was regarded by some as a continuation of the one in Jalapa in 1951.

These were the earliest efforts to provide psychiatric care informed by the many social and cultural contexts of Latin America.

More than fifty years later, an enthusiastic group of professionals took on, as a tribute to those pioneers, the task of continuing their scientific and academic exchange. The new Latin American Group of Transcultural Studies (GLADET, A. C.) was founded in Guadalajara, México, in February 2007, as a group of mental health professionals interested in psychiatric research, clinical practice, teaching and divulgation of psychiatry and its links to Latin American culture. A goal of GLADET, A. C. is to show the importance of cultural factors in the many aspects of mental health. Dr. Sergio J. Villaseñor Bayardo is the founding president of this association, which includes outstanding mental health professionals from Latin America and the rest of the world. Among its members are Carlos Rojas Malpica and Néstor De La Portilla (from Venezuela), Julio Acha and Aitor Castillo (from Peru), Eduardo Medina (from Chile), Humberto Casarotti (from Uruguay), Kamaldeep Bhui (from the United Kingdom), Jean Garrabé and Yves Thoret (from France), Goffredo Bartocci (from Italy), Wen-Shing Tseng and Renato Alarcón (from the U. S. A.), as well as Héctor Pérez-Rincón, José Dorazco Valdéz, Jesús Gómez Plascencia, José Contreras, Ricardo Virgen, Hugo A. Ascencio and Martha Patricia Aceves (from Mexico).

One year after being founded, GLADET, A. C., together with the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry, the Transcultural Psychiatry section of the WPA, the Latin American Psychiatry Association and the French association L´Évolution Psychiatrique, among other important associations, held its First International Congress, focusing on Psychiatry, nature, and culture: from the individual to the universal, whose main objective was to bring together the views of psychiatrists, researchers, and mental health staff with a particular interest in transcultural psychiatry in Latin America and the rest of the world.

Two years later, in Cuzco, Peru, GLADET, A. C. held its Second International Congress, together with the XXIth Peruvian Congress of Psychiatry.

Now, GLADET A. C. has extended an invitation to its Third International Congress, which will address issues of violence and migration from the perspective of transcultural psychiatry, in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico, in August 2012. (http://www.gladet.org.mx/es/index.html)