This column provides news from Professor Tuula Tamminen regarding some exciting infant mental health initiatives. Tuula Tamminen is from Finland and is a long standing WAIMH member. She was the President of WAIMH from 2004 to 2008 and was presented with the Honorary President Distinction in 2012. She is currently on the WAIMH ethics committee who are drafting the WAIMH Infant Rights Declaration.
Tuula is a newly elected member of the European Commission’s Scientific Panel for Health
Within the past month, Tuula was nominated as a member of the European Commission’s (EC) Scientific Panel for Health. The European Commission is the “government” of European Union (EU) and its Scientific Panel for Health is a most prestigious and rigorous scientific body in the European Union. It focuses on the health needs and aspirations of those in Europe, but as it is a collaborative international body, it also works with non-European partners. As such, funding grants for research, such as infant mental health research, may be considered from partners within, and outside of Europe. Tuula says that she is “looking forward to seeing excellent applications on infant mental health…”
On behalf of the WAIMH family, the Perspectives team would like to congratulate Tuula on this appointment.
Horizon 2020: Research funding possibilities for Infant Mental Health
Horizon 2020 (2014/2015 and 2016/2017) is a research funding program. It is an initiative of the European Union, and as Tuula reminds us, it is their “biggest research funding program ever”. Within this program, health science and research are under the scope of “Societal Challenge (SC1)” and named as “Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing”. There are 8 key focuses for 2016/2017, with one of these being early development and it’s relation to mental health. For further information follow the link:
https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regexpert/index.cfm?do=groupDetail.groupDetailDoc&id=15073&no=1
This Horizon 2020 program in conjunction with Tuula on the EC scientific panel for health, presents a marvelous opportunity to all of our WAIMH members to direct IMH research funding submissions to this program.
Infant Mental Health training in Arabic countries (www.emacapap.org )
Tuula shares with us the following:
Four years ago I was in a World Health Organization (WHO) Task Force together with Professor John Fayyad from Lebanon and we talked about infant mental health training in Arabic countries. John has worked hard and now there will be the First Arab and Eastern Mediterranean Infant Mental Health Meeting in Kuwait (www.emacapap.org ). This is one step on our long road to global presence of infant mental health professionals.
Rutter’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (6th Ed.) Wiley Press.
Rutter’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (6th Edition) is now in press. Within this text, keep an eye out for a chapter on “Infant/early years mental health”. This chapter has been written by Tuula and Kaija Puura, and it is the very first time that Rutter’s textbook will have a chapter on infant mental health. Following many tight revisions (as is in keeping with the rigor of such high quality publications) Tuula and Kaija recently saw the final proofs. Amidst the delight in seeing the chapter in its final shape, Tuula said:
Gladly the figure presenting map of globe with WAIMH’s affiliates and logo is still there! At least in the proofs the picture is a full page picture! This also helps us to get visibility around the world.
On behalf of the WAIMH family, the Perspectives team would like to congratulate Tuula and Kaija on this publication, and, for their generous work in keeping WAIMH in view. We look forward to reading the chapter, learning from it and citing it frequently in our writing.
Celebrating WAIMH members´ contributions to infant mental health: News from Professor Tuula Tamminen
Authors
WAIMH,
United States
