After the unfortunate cancellation of the inaugural International Conference in Shanghai due to COVID-19, the first International Conference was held in Paris on September 19–20, 2024, under the theme “Cultural Psychiatry & Art” Co-organized with the GHU Paris Psychiatry & Neuroscience and the France–Latin America Coordination of Psychiatry (COFALP), the conference brought together experts from eleven countries. Structured across two days and six thematic sessions, the program was moderated by an international panel of chairs and discussants.
Theme 1 explored historical and institutional links between hospitals, patients, and museums, featuring contributions from curators and historians on cultural rights, museum-based activities for people with psychological disabilities, and the evolution from “art of the mad” to contemporary curation. Theme 2 addressed the use of art as therapy and a tool in psychosocial rehabilitation, with presentations from Japan, Mexico, and France on resilience, creative processes, and clay-based therapeutic workshops. Subsequent themes examined art as a creative research methodology and institutional tool (Theme 3), showcasing projects from Oxford, Argentina, and the Paris Opera, alongside art as mediation through diverse devices in child psychiatry, architecture workshops, and museum-trunk initiatives (Theme 4). Theme 5 focused on art’s role in supporting families, illiterate patients, and therapeutic accompaniment, with perspectives from Uganda, Pakistan, and Mexico, while Theme 6 tackled art as a means of fighting forgetting, addressing psychotrauma and the language of war, including a moving presentation from Ukraine and a photography project with indigenous communities in Chiapas.
The conference culminated in a dedicated session synthesizing insights from prior preparatory webinars, featuring lexical and thematic analyses of the discussions. This work laid the groundwork for the “Paris Declaration on Art and its Benefits in Mental Health and Psychiatry,” a formal statement endorsed by the organizing bodies.