Welcome message.

Dear Friends:

We are pleased to announce that the 2019 edition of the World Mental Health Congress, organized by the World Federation for Mental Health, will take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from November 5 to November 8, 2019

Buenos Aires is one of the world's most beautiful cities. It is a cosmopolitan city whose unique cultural tradition is a fascinating combination of the traditional and the modern.

Argentina is a country that offers a variety of cultural, sporting, and touristic experiences in every part of its extensive territory. While visiting the country's plains, mountains, snowfields and beaches, a tour can take you from a gourmet restaurant to the country's most traditional native foods while making stops at world-class bookstores, museums, and theaters.

The 2019 World Congress will be organized by the Argentinian Association for Mental Health (AASM), a voting member of the World Federation for Mental Health.

With this Congress, AASM continues its tradition of organizing prestigious mass events that bring together almost four thousand local and international delegates every year.

This World Congress follows the 2013 World Congress, also organized by the WFMH and the AASM, which brought together more than five thousand delegates from seventy-three countries. A variety of mental health professionals and members of the community took part in this event, along with users of mental health services and officials from numerous countries and international organizations around the world.

Since it was founded in 1948, at its first conference in London, the WFMH has held World Congresses in different countries every two years. The most recent Congresses took place in Athens, Cape Town, Cairo and New Delhi.

We hope that this Congress will be a space in which we can freely discuss and analyze the widest possible range of topics in the field of mental health, allowing for a productive interchange between representatives from all over the world for the benefit of people with mental illness and their families.

The theme of this Congress will be "Inclusive Approaches to Mental Health. Clinical Practice, Community and Rights." With these as watchwords, what we aim do is ask each other about the practices that are currently necessary to approach issues affecting people with mental illness from a "rights perspective," utilizing approaches that are rooted in the community and the local region but without neglecting clinical practice and the contributions made by others branches of Health.

We start from the premise that people with mental illness have the right to live in the community and close to their loved ones and to make choices about their treatment, that they have the right to work, to decent housing, and — most essentially — to not be stigmatized or excluded from their health system or their community. Accordingly, it is important to reaffirm that nobody should be condemned to live in a hospital.

In the name of he Argentinean Association for Mental Health (AASM) and the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), we are very pleased to invite you to the 2019 World Mental Health Congress.

We hope to see you in Buenos Aires from November 5 to November 8, 2019 and to welcome you to the world's most important mental health congress!

Dr. Alberto Trimboli
President, WFMH