Chair International Mental Health Collaborating Network (Italy)

Roberto Mezzina, psychiatrist, is one of the founders, and currently Chair, of the International Mental Health Collaborating Network established in 2001. He is also Vice President (Program Development) of the World Federation for Mental Health.

Dr Mezzina contributed, as clinician and manager, from 1978 on to the experience of Trieste, which inspired the Italian Mental Health Reform Law of 1978, closing the psychiatric hospital and creating a network of totally alternative community based network of services. This is recently reconfirmed as a model for the World Health Organisation (2021).

In the Trieste Department of Mental Health, till his retirement in October 2019, he has been Director of a CMH Centre (for 1995) and of the whole Department between 2012 and 2019, as well as from 2009 Head of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training.

He also supported the development of community-based services worldwide (e.g., crisis, recovery, peer support, forensic services etc) as well as consulted on reform policies worldwide (UK, Denmark, Czech Republic, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Poland, Serbia, France, Palestine among others).

Dr Mezzina has been invited as teacher, keynote speaker and expert in hundreds of conferences and courses hold by Scientific Institutes, Universities, Mental Health Services in Italy, Europe and overseas. Prized by Zero Project at UN in Vienna, 2014, and as European Personality of the Year Award by Gamian Europe in 2017, he is currently an Advisor of WHO for the World Mental Health Report and for Mental Health Impact of Covid-19.