Our Speakers
Psychologist | Scientist | Author | Creator of the Mind Locker Method™
Portugal
This session introduces the Mind Locker Method™, a structured psychological approach focused on real-time regulation during ongoing stress. Developed through lived experience and clinical practice, it explores how individuals can maintain clarity, emotional stability, and functional capacity under pressure, while offering a scalable, non-pharmacological perspective relevant to clinical, performance, and broader mental health systems.
This session explores how artificial intelligence in mental health moves from promising innovation to sustained use within real-world care systems. While AI-driven tools continue to expand across research and pilot settings, their integration into everyday clinical and community environments remains uneven. Bringing together perspectives across technology, implementation, and care delivery, the discussion focuses on where adoption breaks down, what enables system readiness, and how AI solutions can be designed to function effectively within complex, real-world mental health systems.
This session presents a community-based early intervention model addressing the gap between early signs of distress and formal mental health care. It explores how awareness can function as a system-level mechanism rather than an individual responsibility. Through the HOPE Framework, the session highlights how culturally responsive, non-clinical approaches can support early recognition and improve system responsiveness across community settings.
This session examines how humanitarian mental health responses interact with longer-term system development. Drawing on extensive experience across disaster and conflict settings, it explores where continuity of care is maintained and where fragmentation occurs between emergency interventions and sustained service structures. The discussion highlights how Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) frameworks can be better aligned with broader system design to support more consistent, coordinated, and resilient mental health outcomes beyond the immediate crisis phase.
This session reframes mental health workforce capacity by extending it beyond formal clinical roles. It explores how awareness-capable environments within families, schools, and communities can function as an extension of system capacity. Using a structured framework, the session highlights how distributed awareness can support earlier intervention and reduce delays in care within resource-constrained systems.
This session reframes disengagement as an early signal of underlying psychological stress rather than a standalone behavioral issue. Drawing from work in education and performance environments, it explores how systems interpret and respond to behavioural patterns. The session highlights how early identification of these signals can support more responsive, human-centered interventions and improve outcomes across learning and development systems.
This keynote explores the distinction between integration and coherence within mental health systems. Drawing from long-term clinical practice, it examines how systems may appear functionally integrated yet fail to sustain alignment under real-world pressure. The session introduces a coherence-based perspective, focusing on how psychological experience, identity, and system structures interact, and what enables systems to remain stable, adaptive, and meaningful over time.
This session examines how psychological support can be more effectively integrated within fertility and reproductive health systems. It explores the emotional complexities associated with infertility and treatment processes, and the gaps between clinical care and mental health support. The discussion highlights how coordinated, patient-centered approaches can enhance care continuity and improve overall wellbeing within reproductive health settings.
This session examines how mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) models transition from emergency response to long-term system integration. Drawing on extensive experience in humanitarian settings, it explores where continuity of care is maintained and where fragmentation occurs. The discussion highlights structural and operational factors that influence system resilience, and how crisis response can be better aligned with sustainable mental health systems.
This session explores a shift from individual-centered mental health approaches toward community-based models of care. It examines how social environments, relationships, and shared experiences influence psychological wellbeing. The discussion highlights how strengthening community-level support structures can enhance prevention, reduce isolation, and create more sustainable pathways for mental health within diverse populations.
This session examines a persistent challenge within mental health systems — why well-developed program evaluation frameworks often struggle to translate into consistent real-world impact. While evaluation models provide structured approaches to measuring effectiveness, gaps frequently emerge when these frameworks are applied within complex, resource-constrained, and dynamic service environments. Drawing on perspectives from behavioral science, program evaluation, and applied mental health practice, this session explores where and why these disconnects occur — particularly across implementation, service delivery, and system integration.
This session explores the critical role of peer support within mental health systems, particularly in bridging the gap between formal care and real-world recovery. While clinical models often focus on diagnosis and treatment, peer-led approaches bring lived experience, continuity, and relational support into the recovery process — addressing needs that structured systems may overlook. Drawing from practice-based insights, the session examines how peer support functions within community and service settings, especially for individuals navigating serious mental illness (SMI) and substance use challenges.