Summary: today’s workshop on literature review and visualization, focused on publication retrieval, entity extraction, and social-semantic network mapping, will be postponed. I must prioritize the final stages of my doctoral dissertation and parallel responsibilities in Indonesia, while also advancing the launch of EU COST BEACON. Interim updates will be shared in September, beginning with a post detailing how to use a simple Python script with main scientific repositories for automated literature retrieval. The full workshops are rescheduled for October and November. Protocols for Youth Digital Mental Health and EU COST BEACON One Health Education via Digital Technologies will be submitted to Open Research Europe before then. All work is set to be completed on time before the year ends, as scheduled.

I must inform you that today’s workshop on literature review and visualization, our initial session on paper and book chapter retrieval, entity extraction, and the construction of interactive social-semantic networks analyzing relations while mapping authors, topics, institutions, and publications, scheduled a few months ago, will be postponed until next month. The new date will be polled as soon as possible.

I sincerely apologize to the members of the Youth Digital Mental Health action and to colleagues within EU COST BEACON One Health Education via Digital Technologies who signed up, and all of you receiving this email. Both initiatives rely on my contributions to advance the mappings and reviews scheduled for completion before the end of this year. With this message, I reassure all work is to be completed on time before the year ends, as planned. The primary reason for the postponement is the necessity to prioritize other pressing commitments: these include my ongoing responsibilities as a medical anthropologist currently based in Indonesia, engaged in action research for the abolition of pasung, a still widespread form of domestico-medical severe mistreatment in Indonesia, as well as the completion of my doctoral dissertation, which I am due to defend in the coming weeks.

In parallel, I am dedicating substantial efforts to the expansion and launch event of EU COST BEACON and to the establishment of the software infrastructure required for its optimal operation. In my capacity as action founder and currently scientific communications, dissemination, and exploitation officer, it is my duty to ensure that our actions grows stronger into a robust excellence network numbering several thousand members by the time of the official launch event next month, as an elite devoted community capable and fully engaged in achieving all objectives within the designated timeframe. This undertaking includes not only the consolidation of technical expertise and the cultivation of durable partnerships with allied initiatives such as Youth Digital Mental Health, but also the design and deployment of a pan-European media campaign to guarantee broad visibility and recognition of our work.

EU BEACON is being built on a fully open-source infrastructure, designed to enable all members to collaborate effectively under the highest open science and data standards. For videoconferencing we are adopting BigBlueButton (BBB), the platform France has deployed nationwide across its schools, due to its educational features, transparency, and scalability. Project management will run on LeanTime, whose flexible and visually structured design makes it particularly suitable for neurodiverse collectives, helping participants to focus, plan, and contribute with ease. For governance, we are implementing Consul Democracy, the leading open-source framework for ethical, transparent, and participatory decision-making. It will allow us to deliberate proposals, debate online, vote on budgets, and collectively select the most effective strategies to meet our objectives. We are engaging the open source developer communities, along with computer scientists, health science specialists, social scientist and pedagogists, as well as biologists, cognitive scientists, economists, administrators, governors, and all relevant experts. As you know, EU BEACON is set to become a flagship initiative for one health education and digital innovation, positioning itself at the forefront of transdisciplinary collaboration, open science, and impactful knowledge dissemination across Europe and beyond.

The deployment of the needed tools and more skilling up sessions will follow, as the infrastructure is progressively readied. Presentation sessions to new and current members will soon be shared, as well as media sessions with outlets and science popularizers across the EU and COST areas. We are working hard on our outreach, currently expanding to tens of thousands, employing the same computational and analytical techniques that underpin the mapping and literature research exercises. All materials will be disseminated in due course.

My proposal is therefore to defer today’s workshop until next month and the next, and instead provide a series of interim updates in written form, to be shared over the coming weeks. Those posts will include preparatory material relevant to the workshops planned for October and November. Participants will need both Python and R installed in order to follow the exercises. The first installment will feature a simple script for retrieving publications by keyword from major academic databases and extracting their metadata. I expect to make this available, together with a code repository, by the end of September. By that time, both our mapping and literature review protocols, Youth Digital Mental Health and EU COST BEACON, will also have been submitted to Open Research Europe -as the documents are already ready-, potentially along a white paper on the technology stack to be used.

Please make sure that Python and R are installed in advance in your computer, should you wish to follow the upcoming posts and workshops. These sessions will demonstrate how to process entire collections of sources at once, enabling semi-automated workflows that can compress tasks otherwise requiring weeks or months into a matter of hours. The goal is to equip participants with practical tools for large-scale literature retrieval, entity extraction, and network analysis, thereby accelerating the production of robust, evidence-based reviews and mappings. I regret the delay and thank you for your understanding.

Madrid has silently become a referential node in the global cartography of healthy aging, at once a bio-political laboratory and a geopolitical beacon for longevity-centered development. Far beyond a statistical outlier, the Spanish capital now holds the highest life expectancy among all major European metropolitan regions, exceeding 86 years at birth. This datum, in its deceptive simplicity, condenses decades of infrastructural, nutritional, regulatory, and societal transformations. But what lies beneath this rise is not merely a biomedical success. It is a profound reconfiguration of how life itself is administered, governed, and extended under the auspices of medico-legal and normative apparatuses at the core of contemporary bio-politics. This requires de conciliation of all sciences and its implementation.

The convergence of life sciences, political will, urban planning, and health jurisprudence has enabled Madrid to outperform not only its continental peers but even the legendary so-called blue zones—geographical enclaves where extreme longevity has been a traditional constant. In contrast to those relatively isolated and culturally homogeneous areas, Madrid emerges as a post-industrial, multicultural, densely populated and highly mobile capital that, nevertheless, achieves indicators previously reserved for contexts where modernity was held at bay. The paradox is instructive. It indicates that longevity, once imagined as an anthropological residue of non-Western lifestyles, can indeed be systematically produced within advanced legal-medical regimes, if and only if the correct structural variables are aligned.

This convergence is neither accidental nor neutral. The rise of Madrid as a longevity capital reflects a deliberate bio-political orientation in the management of aging populations, embedded in institutional configurations that combine public health ethics with a forward-looking legal framework. The medico-legal architecture of Spain, grounded in universal healthcare access, evidence-based clinical governance, and proactive regulatory harmonization, has facilitated a form of life extension that is not only biological but political in nature. That is, it extends not merely the lifespan of individuals but the reproductive viability of the polity itself, in demographic, fiscal, and epistemic terms. Madrid, as such, becomes both a lived phenomenon and a jurisdictional model: a territory where the governance of senescence has matured into a planetary proposition. The ongoing urgent reconfiguration has yet again become a reality as a more politically charged action than ever: the hosting of the second International Longevity Summit in Madrid, with the active involvement of the Illustrious College of Medical Doctors (ICOMEM) and the International Longevity Alliance (ILA). The summit is not a mere academic congress. It constitutes a performative act of geopolitical positioning, whereby Spain claims intellectual leadership and policy agency in one of the most consequential domains of human futures, healthspan optimization and age-related risk compression.

The event, gathering over half thousand top elite participants, fully engaged national experts and world-leading researchers in aging biology, gene regulation, longevity medicine, and regenerative technologies, operates as a nodal point in this most needed realignment of global attention toward all proper centers of translational geroscience, public and one health, along with all related disciplines.

From a geopolitical standpoint, Madrid now occupies the role of a convening capital for transnational coalitions focused on health sovereignty, technoethical convergence, and juridical preparedness for the coming transformation of human aging. The gathering of high-profile figures, such as senior academics from top-tier institutions, biotech industry pioneers, and public health skilled expert visionaries properly undertaking the urgent work, signals more than mutual interest. It reflects a nascent consensus that the future of aging, and therefore of governance itself, will be determined by those jurisdictions capable of integrating science, ethics, law, and strategic communication within a coherent longevity doctrine.

In this context, the summit becomes the symbolic and operational epicenter for issuing new norms, starting with the Madrid Longevity Declaration, a document expected to formalize shared principles for advancing longevity research and interventions under ethical and evidence-based criteria. The declaration will likely articulate normative baselines for the deployment of emerging health technologies, the regulation of age-delaying pharmaceuticals, and the creation of new juridical categories recognizing biological age as a legal parameter. These developments represent a fundamental shift in health jurisprudence: from the mere treatment of pathology to the institutional prolongation of vitality.

The work ongoing and ambition goes further. Madrid’s position rests not only on its population’s biostatistical advantage but on its capacity to host and anchor transnational frameworks of legitimacy. The ILA, through its coordination and multilateral networks, aims to advance longevity not only as a scientific pursuit but as a universalizable right, a next-generation health right demanding institutional codification. In this sense, Madrid is becoming a staging ground for future legal debates on the categorization of aging as a treatable condition, the redistribution of longevity dividends, and the public governance of biomedical breakthroughs. These debates will not remain domestic. They are inherently cosmopolitical, involving supranational legislation, interagency coordination, and global advocacy, as reflected in the structural presence of ILA and its links to over 70 organizations worldwide.

All this occurs in the shadow of Europe’s own neglect of its population and future, the oldest continent demographically. With Spain being the oldest large country in the EU, no unified policy structure yet exists to systematically address the life course as a jurisdictional terrain. Madrid, with its institutional momentum and the hosting of the Longevity Summit, is positioning itself to fill that vacuum. The city emerges as a bio-political reference point capable of reshaping the European conversation on what it means to live longer, and to do so with health, dignity, autonomy, and purpose. Proper systems urgently implemented are desperately required to avoid further misery and early demises.

In defending the right and opportunity to become a blue zone, Madrid challenges prevailing assumptions about the trajectory of aging societies, both nationally and internationally. It needs to become one of the brightest beacons, one of the few good examples to inspire and follow. Where others see dependency ratios, fiscal burdens, and gerontocratic stagnation, the Spanish model proposes a different ontology of aging: one of capacity, resilience, and enhanced societal contribution across all life stages. This reframing is not simply rhetorical. It bears juridical consequences, such as the need to redesign pension frameworks, labor laws, and public health systems to accommodate an active centenarian population. It also implies ethical obligations regarding intergenerational equity, access to anti-aging therapies, and the fair distribution of longevity technologies once commercialized.

The bio-political and cultural dimension of the summit cannot be underestimated. Preceding the main event are curated tours through Castilla La Mancha, linking the modern science of aging to the historical legacies of Spanish intellectual and aesthetic life. This blending of heritage and futurity of Cervantes and CRISPR symbolizes a broader synthesis at the heart of Madrid’s longevity proposition. The city proposes not only an extension of time but a qualitative revaluation of life across that time. Health, art, knowledge, and civic participation are no longer sequential goods reserved for different life stages but simultaneous pillars of a comprehensive human flourishing across the lifespan.

This vision will be enacted again during the Madrid March for Longevity, a gathering and procession from the center of the capital (Puerta del Sol) to the iconic Cibeles Fountain. In a manner reminiscent of public health movements of past centuries, this march transforms space into message. It proclaims the city as both the agent and the recipient of longevity: a civic body that not only administers extended life but is itself reanimated through the political act of care. For continued engagement, access to current initiatives and coordination channels with the International Longevity Alliance and its affiliated programs is facilitated through https://www.youtube.com/@AlianzaFuturista and direct communication via https://alianzafuturista.org/contacto.html. These platforms do not serve merely as dissemination tools but function as dynamic operational infrastructures for translational longevity science. They are intended to support evidence-based, legally compliant, and ethically grounded implementation frameworks, enabling multidisciplinary cooperation and strategic alignment across clinical, regulatory, and institutional domains committed to the large-scale realization of healthy lifespan extension.

The ascent of Madrid as Europe’s longevity capital is not a spontaneous demographic phenomenon, but the emergent result of layered interventions across public health governance, clinical jurisprudence, urban design, and fiscal architecture. The International Longevity Summit staged in the amphitheatre once occupied by Ramón y Cajal is thus not only a nod to Spanish scientific legacy but a staging ground for a new medico-legal order in which aging ceases to be viewed as an inevitable biological decline and is instead recast as a modifiable condition, subject to therapeutic interruption, legal recognition, and ethical contestation. In this reconfiguration, the line between treatment and enhancement, between public interest and private intervention, becomes a critical terrain of regulatory contention. The field of longevity medicine, once marginal, now institutionally endorsed, operates in a zone of legal indeterminacy. Therapies that delay or reverse biomarkers of aging challenge classical thresholds used in regulatory science, what constitutes a disease, who defines the clinical endpoint, how risk is stratified when the target is the aging process itself, a universal yet heterogeneous trajectory. Madrid’s consolidation of expertise, regulation, and symbolic capital in this domain allows it to serve as a referential jurisdiction for navigating such uncertainties.

This has profound implications for medico-legal reform. If aging is framed as a risk condition, preventive interventions will require not only medical validation but legal accommodation. The classification of geroprotective compounds, the authorization of personalized anti-aging therapies, and the inclusion of biological age metrics in insurance, employment, and civil rights frameworks are all pending legal transformations. Madrid, by positioning itself at the epicenter of these developments, gains early mover influence in determining the standards that may be adopted beyond Spanish borders. In effect, Spain is now co-producing the juridical future of life extension. Moreover, the geopolitical alignment of Madrid’s longevity turn extends far beyond the Iberian Peninsula. The involvement of global actors, ranging from academic laboratories to philanthropic health accelerators and biotechnology consortia, anchors the city within a broader planetary reorganization of health futures. Unlike traditional centers of biomedical authority (Boston, London, Geneva), Madrid leverages its statistical advantage and institutional adaptability to project soft power through the governance of healthspan. This is not merely about becoming a hub of research. It is about becoming a node of normativity, a place from which legal models, clinical frameworks, and aging metrics emanate.

This normativity is never to be perceived as unilateral. It involves a circular exchange between biotechnological innovation, civic mobilization, and planetary urgency. In the context of global aging, where population pyramids invert and fiscal systems falter under the weight of late-life dependency, Madrid’s model proposes a counter-narrative, that longer lives, if lived in health, can be net generators of value, wisdom, and civic contribution. This assertion is not ideological, it is actuarial, structural, and supported by the emerging science of delayed morbidity and compressed mortality. The medico-legal challenge is thus to create a framework in which this new arithmetic of aging can be institutionalized. This will require rethinking the architecture of the welfare state itself. Pension systems, retirement thresholds, clinical protocols, public education, and housing law, all must be recalibrated to support a society in which centenarians are neither anomalies nor burdens, but normative actors. Here lies the political content of the longevity movement, not in aesthetic aspirations of youth, but in the demand for structural justice across the lifespan. The idea that a person at 90 may have the same procedural rights to health restoration as someone at 50 destabilizes ageist presumptions and forces a redesign of service provision, clinical prioritization, and intergenerational ethics.

The International Longevity Summit, therefore, is a staging of these transformations not as abstract desiderata, but as live legal and political imperatives. The participation of figures such as Aubrey de Grey, George Church, and Andrea Maier is not cosmetic. These individuals personify the convergence of cutting-edge biology with ethical reckoning. Their presence in Madrid signals a recognition that scientific advances in aging cannot remain within the confines of experimental labs, they demand transposition into the legal codex, the medical curriculum, and the civic imagination. Please, if you may, register as sponsor and/or attendee:

https://www.transvisionmadrid.com/

It is no coincidence that the Summit includes both ceremonial and civil elements, the Madrid March for Longevity, the Longevity Declaration, and the bestowal of Madrid Longevity Prizes. These acts encode the symbolic and normative force of the event. They function as rites of passage into a new societal narrative in which aging is neither feared nor hidden, but addressed directly through coordinated policy, open science, and legally robust health strategies. They also project a claim, that longevity, properly understood, is a common good, not a private luxury. From the strictest legal perspective, this shift implies the proliferation of new standards of evidence, accountability, and legitimacy in the medical handling of aging. Jurisdictions will need to regulate not only treatments but also diagnostics, given the growing role of biological age clocks and AI-powered health predictions. The right not to age biologically faster than medically necessary may emerge as a testable legal claim. Ethical questions will arise concerning access, consent, autonomy, and the potential coercion embedded in longevity mandates within high-performance societies. These issues require anticipatory governance, and Madrid’s institutional ecology, through entities such as ICOMEM and the ILA, is moving in that direction.

The path forward, longevity is no longer a biomedical fantasy. Not the slightest. Be reminded your mobile phone, the internet itself, all technologies that allow, were barely available -and still are to that many- a few decades ago. It is a normative battleground. And Madrid, by combining scientific leadership, political clarity, and cultural legitimacy, is writing the first chapters of a medico-legal narrative that others will follow. Those interested in joining this transformation, whether as researchers, policymakers, clinicians, jurists, or engaged citizens, can connect through the platforms enabled by the International Longevity Alliance at https://www.youtube.com/@AlianzaFuturista, and https://alianzafuturista.org/contacto.html. These are not passive informational outlets, they are calls to participation in the shaping of post-aging futures.

Meeting access has been arranged as follows:
Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/ydn-veye-rbi
Phone (US): +1 617 675 4444, PIN: 758 852 721 8305#
Full access details: https://tel.meet/ydn-veye-rbi?pin=7588527218305
Background and coordination briefing:

EU BEACON One Health education EU COST action

Executive coordination briefing: new membership, new Horizon proposals requiring your engagement, and media kits for October kick off for the action kick-off

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes…

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10 months ago · Henning Garcia Torrents

This coordination moment is not just about proposal design, but about reinforcing the architecture of our shared action. At this stage, four interrelated proposals are being shaped. All are conceived as modular and interoperable elements of a larger open scientific effort, anchored in open science best standards, open health as all encompassing sustainable development goal, human values, interdisciplinary, the gathering of evidence, ensuring public accountability, and real-world institutional reform. These proposals integrate longitudinal fieldwork, technology development, legal and ethical foresight, and educational impact. All results, methods, and resources are being designed under open access and open source frameworks, ensuring full public reuse, reproducibility, and equity of access. Our collective capacity to intervene effectively in the areas of health, education, and the environment depends on this foundational openness. There is no other legitimate scientific path forward.

The proposals currently under coordination include the following:

1. The first focuses on brain health in school environments. It develops structured routines in sleep regulation, physical activity, metabolic balance, and social coherence, aiming to foster measurable improvements in cognition, emotional regulation, and academic performance. These habits and interventions are designed to be taught school-wide, creating living laboratories of embodied health and collective flourishing. Children will learn the biological and behavioural principles underlying their own well-being and will be supported to apply them through everyday practice.

2. The second targets environmental pollutants and their direct impact on neurodevelopment. It seeks to reduce harmful exposure to toxins through improvements in air, soil, water, and food systems. The scientific rationale is grounded in environmental neurotoxicity and cumulative harm. This proposal is particularly attentive to historically exposed populations, including war-affected regions and neglected rural zones. Where possible, it introduces restorative interventions, clean-up protocols, and legal instruments to secure prevention. Justice in environmental health is treated as both a scientific and moral imperative.

3. The third addresses mental health in childhood and adolescence through shared decision-making frameworks. Here, pedagogy, care, and legal responsibility intersect to create relational, participatory models of mental health support—moving beyond coercive, reactive, or fragmented service delivery. Families, teachers, professionals, and children are reconfigured as actors within systems of continuity and mutual accountability. This model integrates trauma-informed practice, ethics of care, and evidence-based approaches to distress, while safeguarding autonomy and trust.

4. The fourth proposal activates internal mentorship and service-learning infrastructures. This initiative introduces structured peer support mechanisms into schools and affiliated services, including through collaboration with higher education institutions. Trainees, future professionals, and community-based mentors are engaged in relational work with children and adolescents, advancing both psychosocial development and institutional resilience. Knowledge transmission, care responsibility, and educational repair become mutually reinforcing processes embedded in lived practice.

All four proposals are intended to operate as a single platform of interlinked work. They respond to overlapping social determinants, and contribute directly to health, educational quality, gender equity, and climate resilience. These are not abstract objectives but measurable targets tied to actual school populations, communities, and institutional partners. Their integration is not theoretical: each proposal is designed to be stacked, cross-validated, and co-evaluated, producing evidence not only of local impact but of system-level reform readiness. This strategic call will be the first of several moments for technical convergence, already the fourth such moment for our network, learning to work together by each new round of consortia formation. Beyond preparing submissions, this is our occasion to strengthen our action through coordinated leadership. We will identify regional and thematic responsibilities, prepare for structural co-supervision, and align our implementation capacities. New participants are welcome, but only if they are ready to work transparently, ethically, and with clear responsibility. This is not a passive invitation, but a direct call to those who have the expertise and the commitment to help us deliver what the moment demands. At least one excellent proposal with winning chances is expected to be submitted.

EU BEACON One Health education EU COST action

BEACON's ultimate ambition is to empower school students as informed, healthy global citizens, proficient in surmounting local and personal obstacles. It aspires to inspire proactive youth who positively influence their lives and enrich their communities.

By Maria Jesus Lirola Manzano

In case the proposals are not ready on time, we will hold. We are building an action network capable of protecting and advancing the lives of children, especially those most systematically excluded from health, care, and education. The work begins here. The summer is before us. The alignment is present. The urgency is clear. One excellent winner proposal may be all we need to launch a long-term transformation.

Thanks for joining in, for sharing this invitation, and being here.

Advancing One Health Education solutions through Interdisciplinary corsortia

In an era where technological advancements often overshadow pressing societal needs, it is imperative to realign our priorities towards holistic well-being. The EU BEACON One Health Education network embodies this shift, aiming to integrate health education from early childhood through a multidisciplinary approach that transcends traditional boundaries. Political climate and old conflicts aside, we aim to achieve what is obviously within reach by today best standards and urgent needs.

We are extending an invitation to professionals across various fields to contribute their expertise to this transformative initiative. Our focus encompasses the development and implementation of innovative educational technologies and mental health interventions that are both ethically sound and globally scalable.

To facilitate this collaboration, we are organizing a virtual meeting:

Date: Thursday, May 22
Time: 17:00 – 18:00 (Asia/Jakarta Time)
Platform: Google Meet
Join via: https://meet.google.com/knv-npqi-dmv

The agenda includes forming consortia to apply for the following funding opportunities:

• Erasmus+: Projects on ethical and effective use of generative AI in education and training. Learn more.

• Wellcome Trust: Research on generative AI applications for anxiety, depression, and psychosis. Learn more.

Your insights and participation are invaluable to the success of these initiatives. Should you be unable to attend, we welcome your contributions via email or through our network platform:

https://health.int.eu.org/

To forge a path towards a more equitable and health-conscious global society. Thank you for considering this opportunity to join in or collaborate.

Our EU BEACON One Health Education network is proposing a dedicated session on One Health Education to address the pressing need for interdisciplinary strategies that integrate human, animal, and environmental health. This session will focus on innovative educational frameworks, case studies demonstrating successful implementation, strategies for integrating One Health concepts into existing curricula, and discussions on policy development to support One Health Education.​

We invite educators, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners with experience or interest in advancing One Health Education to submit their proposals. Presentations should offer evidence-based insights and practical applications that can inform and inspire global efforts.​ Please, let us know if interested in being one of the speakers, and feel free to invite other experts in the field to join us. If the session is admitted, all speakers will be invited to attend the event online for free.

https://sciencesummitnyc.org/who-we-are/

For inquiries or further information, please contact henning.garcia@urv.cat .

We look forward to your participation in shaping the future of One Health Education.

As part of our series on plural approaches to care, we will host a recorded public conversation with Dr. Jacques Mabit, founder of the Centro Takiwasi in Tarapoto, Peru. The session will examine the history of the center, its location at the intersection of clinical psycotherapy and Amazonian ritual medicine, and the epistemological tensions that shape this convergence. A Q&A session with attendees will follow his presentation.

Day and time: Wednesday 7 de mayo a las 11 am (Peruvian time)
18 pm (Spanish time)

Link: https://tinyurl.com/takiwasi-jacques

Established in 1992 in the San Martín region of the Peruvian Upper Amazon, Takiwasi, meaning The House that Sings in Quechua, is more than a treatment facility. It constitutes a space of traditional healing and clinical experimentation, where ayahuasca, plantas maestras, and spiritual frameworks engage with formal therapeutic structures. Legally recognized as a therapeutic community by the Peruvian Ministry of Health, the center also maintains a deep commitment to the region’s rich ethnobotanical heritage.

Takiwasi provides residential addiction treatment, individual retreat programs based on plant diets (dietas), and a therapeutic approach that integrates ritual ingestion, symbolic purification, controlled isolation, and psychotherapeutic accompaniment. The model operates within a deliberately constructed interface between Amazonian cosmology and Western psychological discourse, supported by a multidisciplinary team including physicians, psychologists, and traditional healers.

At the heart of Takiwasi’s practice are so-called plant teachers: botanical beings understood as intelligent, communicative, and diagnostically active. This ontology represents a radical departure from biomedical reductionism. The healing process, particularly within the dieta, involves periods of isolation, fasting, sensory restriction, and symbolic engagement intended to foster interaction with these entities.

Takiwasi’s model is not merely integrative. It proposes a redefinition of therapeutic legitimacy, one that allows plants to speak, and compels scientific rationality to listen. The implications for mental health care, research ethics, and cultural sovereignty are considerable. The event will be conducted in Spanish, recorded, and shared only after review and approval by the participants. A subtitled version will be made available to ensure broader accessibility. A Q&A session with attendees will follow the main dialogue.

Further information on Dr. Jacques Mabit and the work of the Takiwasi Center is available on their official website, https://takiwasi.com, and Dr. Mabit’s book New Applications of Amazonian Indigenous Practices for Drug Addiction Treatment and Mental Health presents key aspects of the center’s therapeutic model, including reflections on ayahuasca use and the integration of traditional medicinal knowledge. Peer-reviewed scientific articles based on Takiwasi’s work can also be found through their online publication archive and in internationally indexed journals.

Fundado en 1992 en la región de San Martín, en la Alta Amazonía peruana, Takiwasi, significando La Casa que Canta en lengua quechua, es mucho más que un centro terapéutico. Es un lugar donde se entrecruzan el saber ancestral y la experimentación clínica, donde el uso ritual de la ayahuasca, las plantas maestras y los marcos espirituales conviven con estructuras formales de acompañamiento terapéutico. Reconocido legalmente como comunidad terapéutica por el Ministerio de Salud del Perú, el centro mantiene además un vínculo profundo con las tradiciones etnobotánicas locales.

Takiwasi ofrece tratamiento residencial para adicciones, retiros con plantas en régimen de dieta, y un enfoque integrado que combina la ingestión ritual, la purificación simbólica, el aislamiento y el acompañamiento psicoterapéutico. Su modelo opera en una interfaz cuidadosamente construida entre la cosmovisión amazónica y el lenguaje psicológico occidental, con un equipo multidisciplinar compuesto por médicos, psicólogos y sanadores tradicionales.

Los agentes terapéuticos centrales del centro son las plantas maestras: entidades botánicas comprendidas como dotadas de inteligencia, capacidad comunicativa y poder diagnóstico. Esta concepción se aleja radicalmente del reduccionismo farmacológico. El proceso terapéutico, especialmente en el marco de las dietas, se basa en el aislamiento, el ayuno, la restricción sensorial y la inmersión simbólica, con el objetivo de facilitar un encuentro con estas plantas desde una lógica relacional y no instrumental. El enfoque de Takiwasi no pretende una simple integración. Su apuesta es la construcción de un nuevo modelo de legitimidad terapéutica, que invite a las plantas a hablar y exija a la racionalidad científica aprender a escuchar. Las implicaciones para la atención en salud mental, la ética de la investigación y la soberanía cultural son profundas.

Esta actividad se desarrollará en castellano, será grabada y compartida tras revisión y aprobación por parte de las personas participantes. Se pondrá a disposición una versión subtitulada para facilitar su difusión internacional. El evento incluirá un espacio final de diálogo abierto con el público.

Puede consultarse más información sobre el Dr. Jacques Mabit y el Centro Takiwasi en su sitio oficial, https://takiwasi.com , asimismo, se recomienda la lectura del libro New Applications of Amazonian Indigenous Practices for Drug Addiction Treatment and Mental Health, de autoría del propio Dr. Mabit, que reúne textos sobre el modelo terapéutico del centro, reflexiones sobre el uso de la ayahuasca y la articulación de saberes medicinales indígenas en el abordaje de las adicciones. Diversos artículos científicos basados en el trabajo del centro están también disponibles en su web y han sido publicados en revistas académicas de reconocido prestigio.

This session addresses the often-overlooked cultural and institutional dimensions of accreditation in medical education. Drawing on long-term ethnographic involvement in an allopathic medical school undergoing a multi-year accreditation cycle, Dr. Crowder examines how accreditation criteria shape the selection of applicants, the delivery of curricula, the construction of professional competencies, and the formation of clinical identity. The presentation will highlight how anthropological tools -particularly ethnographic analysis and visual mapping- reveal the value systems embedded in accreditation and the ways these systems impact the everyday training of health professionals. The case underscores the necessity of including anthropologists in accreditation processes and the wider implications for medical education reform.

Date: April 23, 2025
Time: 11:00 AM US Eastern Time (ET)
5:00 PM Central European Summer Time (CEST)
Presenter: Dr. Jerome Crowder
Zoom link: https://csulb.zoom.us/j/87599588171
Meeting ID: 875 9958 8171

The AAA SMA Health Professions Education Special Interest Group was formally approved by the SMA Executive Board on November 11, 2022, as an initiative within the American Anthropological Association. The SIG was established to formalize and expand the presence of anthropological perspectives in medical and health professions education. It engages in sustained efforts to integrate anthropology into teaching, policy, professional accreditation, and curriculum development across the entire educational continuum.

The group maintains a global and inclusive approach to membership. Students, faculty, health practitioners, and others interested in applying anthropological methods and frameworks to health professions education are welcome. Membership is open, without fees, and not limited to members of the SMA or AAA.

https://medanthro.net/interest-groups/hpe/

The SIG’s mission is to support anthropologists in making a lasting impact on medical and health professions education by providing an organizational structure that promotes professional identity, career development, and public visibility. Activities are organized through Working Groups focused on strategic priorities including teaching, accreditation, policy, and representation on professional boards and examinations. The SIG also advocates for structural reforms that legitimize anthropology as a core component in the education and certification of health professionals.

Current leadership of the SMA HPE SIG includes Dr. Richard A. Gonzalez, Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, and Henning Garcia Torrents, Professor in Training and PhD Researcher. The SIG continues to build on the foundations set by the 2021 volume Anthropology in Medical Education: Sustaining Engagement and Impact, edited by Dennis Wiedman and Iveris Martinez, which documented the global contributions of anthropologists to physician training and informed the SIG’s initial priorities. Further information and updates are available via the SMA’s official communication channels.

Join the meeting:
https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/383327601863?p=lffmT4yo0fQK6dVnfp

Dr. Cathy Wield is an Emergency Physician with clinical experience in both emergency medicine and psychiatry. The daughter of a British diplomat, she spent much of her childhood overseas before completing her education in the UK. After raising four children, she resumed her medical career, which was twice interrupted by episodes of severe mental illness. Her first encounter with psychiatric care culminated in brain surgery, followed by a sudden and unexpected recovery that defied clinical expectations. Despite enduring repeated hospitalisations and psychiatric interventions that often intensified her suffering, she returned to clinical practice and became a visible advocate against mental health stigma. She is the author of Life After Darkness: A Doctor’s Journey Through Severe Depression (Radcliffe, 2006) and A Thorn in My Mind: Mental Illness, Stigma and the Church (Instant Apostle, 2011). While living in Denver, Colorado, she rediscovered her passion for creative writing and now leads free writing workshops as a tool for healing and self-expression. Her story is one of profound pain, but also of resilience, clarity, and enduring hope.

As someone who has endured years of family abuse, institutional violence, and psychiatric mistreatment myself – and who now works as a researcher and university professor in training, despite having been silenced, dehumanised, violated, and cast aside by a system designed to chronify distress rather than address its roots – I know how essential it is to make space for voices like hers.

Distressingly, current clinical practice continues to reduce complex human suffering to narrow biomedical categories, promoting a superimposed narrative of biological causality under the pretense of scientific neutrality. This framework overrides the lived realities of abuse, violence, inequality, and social marginalisation – all well-documented as central to the emergence and persistence of psychological distress. Instead of recognising this complexity, the system routinely pathologises survivors, imposing reductive diagnostic labels while disregarding social, relational, and structural dimensions of suffering.

Worse still, the treatments offered within this model – often coercive and frequently iatrogenic – cause significant harm. Informed consent is routinely compromised, and alternative approaches to healing are marginalised or excluded altogether. Trauma-informed, rights-based, and community-rooted forms of support that honour experience and autonomy are rarely accessible. The system that claims to provide care often obstructs recovery through its own prejudices, power imbalances, and structural rigidity. Rather than offering protection, it deepens suffering and perpetuates cycles of harm under the guise of help.

Meaningful reform demands more than incremental change. It requires a fundamental shift – one that centres dignity, justice, and full recognition of the social and political contexts of mental distress. The knowledge and frameworks for change already exist. What remains lacking is the institutional will to make them the norm rather than the exception.

This event is not merely a book presentation – it is a space for collective reflection on lived experience, on systemic violence, and on the urgent need to place consent, care, and justice at the heart of mental health practice. Dr. Cathy Wield’s testimony reveals how these systems silence, discredit, and retraumatise those they claim to serve, when what is truly needed is a model that centres empathy, affirms dignity, and integrates care with justice.

The prevailing psychiatric paradigm remains, in far too many settings, shaped by coercion, forced treatment, and the denial of the most basic ethical principle: informed consent. Instead of addressing the roots of suffering and recognising the person behind the symptoms, it imposes control, compounds trauma, and obstructs the possibility of recovery. We must reimagine mental health care – not as a system of surveillance and compliance, but as a space of trust, autonomy, and relational support.

I heartfeltly welcome clinicians, researchers, students, and all those with lived experience to join us in this free, open, and respectful dialogue. Dr. Cathy Wield offers a profound testimony of survival, resistance, and healing. Her voice challenges dominant narratives of so-called treatment-resistant illness and opens vital space for person-centred, trauma-informed, rights-based, and recovery-oriented approaches to psychological distress.

If you are interested in this conversation, you may also support related research by completing a short survey on shared decision-making and psychiatric medication. The survey is open to mental health professionals and aims to contribute to reforms grounded in autonomy, ethics, and human rights.

Survey link: https://better.health.int.eu.org/survey/

An upcoming free event will bring together influential voices in the mental health field to discuss key issues surrounding psychiatric care and reform. On March 2nd at 1:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (7:00 PM Central European Time), attorney and mental health advocate Jim Gottstein will share insights from the recently published Report on Improving Mental Health Outcomes, his extensive experience as lawyer defending human rights in mental health, and his book The Zyprexa Papers.

Featured Speaker: Jim Gottstein

Jim Gottstein is a Harvard-educated lawyer and founder of the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights). His legal advocacy has focused on challenging involuntary psychiatric treatments and promoting rights-based mental health care. His book, The Zyprexa Papers, provides an inside look into the legal battles exposing concealed risks associated with the neuroleptic drug Zyprexa and the broader implications for mental health policy (Gottstein, 2020).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gottstein

Event Highlights

This session will feature a discussion of the Report on Improving Mental Health Outcomes, a comprehensive review co-authored by leading experts in the field. The report argues for an urgent shift away from coercive psychiatric practices toward humane, voluntary alternatives, including Peer Respites, Soteria Houses, and Open Dialogue (Gottstein et al., 2023).

Additionally, Gottstein will present findings from The Zyprexa Papers, detailing the legal and ethical concerns surrounding the pharmaceutical industry's handling of psychiatric drugs and the suppression of critical safety information (Gottstein, 2020).

How to Attend

The event is scheduled for March 2nd at 1:00 PM EST (7:00 PM CET). It will be hosted on Microsoft Teams. To join the session, simply click the link below at the scheduled time:

https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/330153946089?p=lunPPKC6iitXeIXWW4

The event will be recorded and posted to this publication and our YouTube channel. While confirmation of attendance is not required, it is highly encouraged. Please email henning.garcia@urv.cat to confirm your participation and/or propose questions to the speaker.

References

Gottstein, J. (2020). The Zyprexa papers. PsychRights Press.

Gottstein, J., Gøtzsche, P. C., Cohen, D., & Burstow, B. (2023). Report on improving mental health outcomes. PsychRights. Retrieved from https://psychrights.org/ReportOnImprovingMentalHealthOutcomes.pdf

For those interested in a deeper exploration of the report, additional resources are available:

• Rights & Recovery Bulletin

• PsychRights: law project for psychiatric rights

This session presents an opportunity to engage with critical discussions on mental health policies, patient rights, and evidence-based alternatives to coercive treatment.