Welcome to the 21st WCP Virtual Congress Program Scheduling

People with DSM-5 intellectual disabilities/intellectual developmental disorders (ID/IDD) or ICD-11 disorders of intellectual development (DID) have multiple unmet healthcare and mental health needs that are either unrecognized or managed ineffectively. The overarching goal of the WPA Working Group on IDD is to develop a balanced framework for addressing global mental health priorities for persons with IDD with a focus on preventing the impact of stigma, discrimination, and social exclusion, especially in low-resource contexts worldwide. The presentations will highlight three major themes: 1) severe underestimation of prevalence and burden of mental disorder in persons with IDD with an example of Mexico and Latin America, akin to other low-resource settings, where the situation represents a “perfect storm” of population growth with gains in childhood survival accompanied with increasing disparities in the index of poverty, low workforce and inadequate psychiatric training (Katz); 2) the newly established WHO Rehabilitation 2030 process for the development of Package of Interventions on Rehabilitation (PIR) for IDD can be integrated as a basis for disseminating knowledge and trainee skill sets (Roy), and 3) the Global Framework for Action Report will explore global examples of effective awareness building, family and community supports, service access, and promotion of high-quality research and regional networks (Munir). The mental health systems need to adequately engage representative groups of persons with IDD whose care can no longer be delivered based on one-size-fits-all assumptions that have gone untested and undervalued, with a need to leverage available resources for the implementation of evidence-based cost-effective services.