Welcome Message

Dear Colleagues, 

It is my great pleasure to announce that the XV Congress of World Association for Psychosocial Rehabilitation  (WAPR) and the Canadian PSR Recovery Conference will be held in Vancouver from 27 to 30 September 2025. The congress is being jointly organized by the WAPR and PSR Canada with the shared objective of promoting discussion and reflections concerning crucial subjects and innovative experiences in the field of Psychosocial Rehabilitation. 

It is clear that the unmet needs of people with psychosocial disabilities have increased over the last few years, and this means we have to make some courageous choices that are capable of redesigning the future of mental health services. These will be called upon to develop more flexible projects of care, confront new types of suffering, and respond to demands involving all stages of life. Adolescence has always been a high-risk period, and the risk had become even more especially afterwards the Covid-19 pandemic, so it is now more urgent than ever to find ways of dealing with adolescent suffering in a prompt and non-stigmatizing manner. But every area of mental health is crying out for innovative interventions that are more than limited organizational adjustments. These involve scientific knowledge and the need to go beyond the biomedical model of psychiatry by highlighting the centrality of the subjectivity of people with lived experience and their dual role as users and members of the community. The greatest attention must therefore be given to the social determinants that lay down pathways of life and delineate high-risk marginalized groups that all too often fail to obtain a satisfactory response from institutions. 

We can expect great challenges in the fields of research, the organization of mental health services, the development of evidence-based practices, and the formulation of a recovery-oriented model of community care that fully respects cultural diversity. 

This complexity finds its expression in the prospect of human rights which, far from being ideological baubles, now propose a theoretical and practical framework in which the various aspects of psychosocial rehabilitation can come together and reinforce each other by sharing innovative experiences that can transform the service network. First and foremost, we can look to the protagonism of users as a reflection of scientific and cultural growth, and an affirmation of human rights. 

The congress will explore all of these crucial themes by involving experts from different continents and all of the stakeholders operating in the field of mental health. We also expect that the participation of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, occupational therapists, people with lived experience, family members, administrators, policy makers will give rise to a richly innovative debate that will contribute towards the realization of an effective system of Psychosocial Rehabilitation.