For Caracas Participants

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Welcome to "information central" for Members of the Alizanza Latina WFSAD, a group of family organizations located in Central and South America.

Background
Our work in Latin America first began in 1991, when we presented workshops at the World Federation for Mental Health Congress in Mexico City and held a first meeting of families in the Central Military Hospital, after developing a dialogue with a senior psychiatrist there. As a result of that meeting, the Mexico City family group called AMAPE was founded. Four years later we visited family groups in Chile and arranged for a conference in Argentina, hosted by APEF, which had recently been established (1994). From those beginnings an ever-growing alliance of family organizations has developed throughout the region.

In 2002, WFSAD Vice President, Martha Piatigorsky spearheaded an initiative that would bring together representatives from as many Latin American family groups as possible, at the 22nd Latin American Congress of Psychiatry. The event was sponsored by Pfizer Neuroscience. WFSAD was successful in applying to the Latin American Psychiatric Association (APAL) to hold a symposium on the topic: "The Benefits of Working with Families of the Mentally Ill." In addition to the symposium, WFSAD arranged for private workshops for the family-member delegates and invited Professor Julian Leff from the United Kingdom to work with the families at these workshops. Delegates were able to describe the work they were doing in their own countries. In the final workshop they discussed common goals for the future and established the group as an entity: the Alianza Latina WFSAD. They drew up a document called the Guatemala Declaration - a ten-point manifesto that was later endorsed by the board of WFSAD and published for the use of members of the group.

In 2003 a second meeting of the Alianza Latina WFSAD was convened during the Regional Psychiatric Congress held jointly by the World Psychiatric Association and APAL. You can read about this meeting under the Caracas Program.

This private area is devoted to the Alianza Latina WFSAD. We hope it will become a vehicle to promote communication, discussion and advancement for this regional group.

Some of the documents in this part of the website are in "PDF" format. To open them, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader, a software that can be downloaded for free from Adobe - click on the button to the right. Please let us know if your have difficulty viewing any of the documents.

Supported by a grant from Pfizer Global Pharmaceuticals