Dear colleagues,

It is a great pleasure and honor to invite you to participate at the First Chinese-Croatian International Conference on Psychiatry and Psychology with the subject of global mental health and emerging challenges of the 21st century. Global mental health is the international perspective on different aspects of mental health, which is of huge importance today, much more than ever before.

We should all be driven by the vision of psychiatry and psychology for a better world and promote mental health for all. Improving treatment strategies for mental disorders is considered as a central health challenge of the dawn in the 21st century, yet promoting public and global mental health may be even more challenging.

Humankind has never faced such multidimensional existential problems as nowadays, and, at the same time, despite the powerful scientific and technological possibilities, is unable to address the scope and solution of these firing-line issues. With COVID-19 pandemic and the mis-infodemics flooding our life, additionally with the war in Ukraine, our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world has fundamentally shifted into the zone of higher risks with multitude of dangers affecting our public and global mental health. Our VUCA world of ethical relativism, individualism, selfishness, global rivalries, wars, free market where everything can be commoditized, seems to be floating over the abyss of many different contradictions and seesaws of war and peace, hatred and love, dys-empathy and empathy, collective insanity and mental health, clash of civilizations and empathic civilization, dark anti-Utopia/Dystopia and Utopia…

The appropriate responses to these issues are well suited for the field of global mental health, an evolving interdisciplinary field of research and wide-ranging practice in order to alleviate mental suffering and promote mental health for all. Global problems need global solutions so culture of empathy, cooperation and partnership is the only route that offers any hope of mental health as a global public good for the better future of all humanity.

Dubrovnik, a beautiful city which is on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites, is a right place where we can promote ideas of strategic harmony, empathic civilization and global mental health for the better future of our world. George Bernard Shaw said: “Those who seek paradise on Earth should come to Dubrovnik”. As cultures, nations, societies, and individual human beings we must learn how to live together in empathy, harmony and friendship to promote public and global mental health and resist influences that turn us against each other. As we all agree that there is no health without mental health you are welcome to join us in the beautiful Dubrovnik and to give your contribution to promotion of global mental health.