What changes when young people help shape the conversation about the future of mental healthcare?
For us, presenting at the World Psychiatric Association’s World Congress of Psychiatry offered an opportunity to explore that question together. Our symposium, Across Cultures, Across Continents: Youth Voices Shaping the Future of Psychiatry, brought different national perspectives into a shared conversation about culture, access, and the responsibilities of emerging leaders.
We arrived with experiences rooted in different countries, yet our presentations returned to a common concern: how can mental healthcare better understand the people it hopes to serve?
Mercedes’s presentation examined the Canadian landscape, where growing public awareness of mental health exists alongside persistent barriers to care. Speaking openly about mental illness does not necessarily mean someone can find affordable support or feel understood when they seek it. Culture, language, geography, and trust all influence whether care feels within reach.
Her reflections on studying medicine in St. Kitts and Nevis gave this discussion a personal dimension. Encountering settings where specialist psychiatric care felt less visible challenged assumptions about how distress is expressed and recognized. Silence could conceal suffering. Family concerns, physical symptoms, or spiritual language could communicate experiences that conventional psychiatric vocabulary might miss. Returning to Canada, these lessons deepened her appreciation for cultural humility within diverse communities.
Miguel’s presentation, From Brazil to the World—and Back Again, explored how international experience can inform change at home. He traced Brazil’s movement toward community-based psychiatric care while considering the inequalities that continue to shape access. His observership at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health offered another perspective on how services can be organized and how clinicians approach care.
For Miguel, looking beyond Brazil strengthened his interest in psychiatry and the value he places on international mentorship. It also raised a practical question: how can lessons learned abroad be adapted thoughtfully to the realities of one’s own community?
Presenting these perspectives together made the value of international exchange tangible. A familiar challenge in one country can look different through another’s history. An approach that seems ordinary within one healthcare system can prompt important questions elsewhere. Sharing a platform with fellow emerging voices reminded us how much we gain when we remain curious about those differences.
As members of Newman Global Initiative’s Global Advisory Committee, we carry these lessons into our leadership. The experience strengthens our commitment to listening before proposing solutions and to creating meaningful opportunities for young people to contribute. It encourages us to approach collaboration with greater confidence, while remaining humble about what we still have to learn.
It also sharpens our understanding of representation. Bringing a perspective to an international forum carries a responsibility to keep listening to the communities behind it, particularly people whose experiences rarely reach a conference stage.
The significance of this experience extends beyond delivering our presentations. It gives us a clearer sense of the leaders we hope to become attentive to context, willing to question assumptions, and committed to making global conversations matter in people’s everyday lives.
Written by : Mercedes Tibollo and Miguel Ângelo de Castro