Theme: Community-Based Participatory Mental Health Care: Focusing on the Role of the Family
Over the past two years, the International East Africa Psychology Conference has turned its focus intentionally toward community-based participatory mental health care, exploring how this approach takes shape across a range of cultural and social settings. At our 2024 gathering, participants explored the nuances of participatory care – from public health systems to spiritual traditions, from childhood trauma to elder wisdom. Through storytelling, research, and local leadership, one truth became clear: the family remains a vital starting point for both healing and harm.
In 2025, we return to this foundational space. Our theme, “Community-Based Participatory Mental Health Care: Focusing on the Role of the Family”, invites us to explore how families shape identity, connection, and support across generations and cultures. Whether biological or chosen, families are often where emotional life begins. They are the first place many of us encounter trust, reconciliation, and belonging, but they can also be spaces where wounds take root—mistrust, exclusion, and harm. Still, it is often within families that we seek protection, meaning, and the possibility of healing.
This theme also acknowledges that families do not exist in isolation. They are shaped by broader forces: systems of care, displacement, poverty, digital realities, faith, and intergenerational trauma. Our five sub themes reflect concerns raised in past conferences and monthly webinars: the need for inclusive and culturally grounded interventions, the complexities of substance use and recovery, the psychosocial impact of environmental disruption, and the importance of listening to lived experience alongside formal research.
We welcome you into this shared space of inquiry, connection, and collective learning – rooted in the belief that families, in all their forms, remain a powerful site for change.
