Course content: The course will be delivered by members of the WPA Working Group on Implementing Alternatives to Coercion in Mental Health Care. We will explore practical ways to address coercive practice while considering human rights, practice improvement, recovery-oriented practice, trauma informed care and the role of lived experience in achieving change. It will highlight the role of psychiatry in promoting change. Service managers, clinicians, and people with lived experience and their families all can play a central role in leading change. Practical steps include policy and legislative change, clinical practice, and personal action in a variety of settings: Personal – attitudes and relationships; Local service level – clinical practice improvement; National policy and legislation, and regional level campaigns. Examples of good practice will be highlighted, and participants will have an opportunity to consider issues in their own countries and how they might become involved.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CPRD) is the first international treaty which brings the rights of persons with disabilities into the ambit of international law. It specifically mentions people with mental disabilities in its Article 1. There has been a great deal of controversy regarding the implications of the CRPD on mental health care. Some have interpreted the CRPD as calling for a total ban on involuntary treatment under all circumstances, while others have called for a more realistic balance of rights recognized in the Convention. Still others have claimed that the convention would leave many people with mental health conditions worse off by interfering with efforts to protect them and called it a ‘problem child of international human rights law’. This session will use presentations of case histories raising questions about the application of the CRPD in clinical practice to provide insights useful in the formulation of suggestions about issues which would be addressed by the WPA in its collaboration with the World Health Organization and other UN agencies

Women’s mental health requires important attention due to genetic and neuroendocrine factors that contribute to the pathogenesis of mental disorders, gender-related vulnerabilities during critical periods of life circle and different responses of females to pharmaceutical treatments. Furthermore, women’s mental health occurs in the context of social phenomena, notably violations of women’s rights and the persistence of violence against women, as well as the special circumstances of female patients with mental disorders and female health professionals working as frontline staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. This symposium focuses on the aims of promoting gender-sensitive and autonomy-enhancing mental health services for women. The talks will address a range of linked topics, namely (i) activities of the International Association of Women’s Mental Health towards investigating major psychosocial problems that women encounter across the world, and ways to protect women’s mental health in the face of psychosocial challenges; (ii) vulnerabilities of females to develop anxiety and depression associated with a history of mental disorders, now exacerbated due to the pandemic-related stresses; (iii) use of pharmacogenetic approaches in specifying the efficient, evidence-based treatment of depressions in women; (iv) bringing the WPA and WHO recommendations for opposing violence against women into clinical practice, with application to the daily life of female patients with mental disorders and female health professionals. To conclude, our international team aspires to formulate actionable resolutions of key recommendations for protecting and improving women’s mental health, based on current progress in neuropsychiatry research and lessons learned about psychosocial stressors arising from pandemic.