The World Psychiatric Association is an international umbrella organisation of psychiatric societies.

Objectives and goals

Originally created to produce world psychiatric congresses, it has evolved to hold regional meetings, to promote professional education and to set ethical, scientific and treatment standards for psychiatry

Psychiatry

Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...

.

History

Jean Delay

Jean Delay

Jean Delay was a French psychiatrist, neurologist and writer. He discovered, jointly with J. M...

 was the first president of the organisation when it was started in 1950. D. Ewen Cameron

Donald Ewen Cameron

Donald Ewen Cameron , commonly referred to as "D. Ewen Cameron" or "Ewen Cameron," was a twentieth-century Scottish-born psychiatrist who was involved in the United States Central Intelligence Agency's research on mind control and served as President of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric...

 became the second president at the formal founding in 1961. Mario Maj is president as of 2008.

Structure

The institutional members of the World Psychiatric Association are 135 national psychiatric societies representing more than 180,000 psychiatrists worldwide. The societies are clustered into 18 Zones and 5 Regions: the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific. Representatives of the societies constitute the World Psychiatric Association General Assembly, the governing body of the organization. The association also has individual members and there are provisions for affiliation of other associations (e.g., those dealing with a particular topic in psychiatry).

Activities

The association has helped establish a code

Code

A code is a rule for converting a piece of information into another form or representation , not necessarily of the same type....

 of professional ethics for psychiatrists. The association has also looked into charges regarding China's treatment of the Falun Gong.