Dear colleagues,

we are very happy to invite you to the 27th World Congress of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine to Tübingen. Under the theme “Advancing Psychosomatic Medicine in a Challenging World” we will focus on current aspects and the challenges ahead of the diagnosis and treatment of the entire spectrum of psychosomatic disorders. We will shed light on the bio-psycho-social factors that are partly responsible for the development, triggering and maintenance of these diseases. 

Founded in 1477, the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen is a respected academic authority in the life sciences and humanities and has been awarded the distinction of being one of the few German Universities of Excellence. Our university is located in one of Germany’s picturesque traditional university towns, Tübingen, near Stuttgart in the state of Baden-Württemberg, with its beautiful old town architecture.

The Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy is part of the Tübingen Centre for Mental Health and has recently been selected as one of the six partner sites of the German Centre for Mental Health (DZPG).

When we as a conference team were first thinking about the theme of the 27th ICPM World Conference on Psychosomatic Medicine, there was no war on Europe’s immediate borders, bringing with it even greater refugee flows and a global energy and food crisis. With our Tübingen ICPM conference team, we have tried not to ignore current developments, but to combine the global perspective with the specific issues of a bio-psycho-social medicine.

In the following we would like to give you a first insight into the topics and speakers and at the same time invite all colleagues interested in bio-psycho-social medicine to actively participate in the conference with their own contributions. With our keynote speakers we will try to highlight current issues relevant to our field of bio-psycho-social medicine. Vikram Patel (Harvard, USA) will give an overview of global mental health, Emily Holmes (Uppsala, Sweden) will talk about the challenges for better and more effective psychotherapy, Patrick McGorry (Melbourne, Australia) will outline challenges for therapy with adolescents and across the lifespan, and Giovanni Fava (Bologna, Italy) will talk about the development of well-being therapy. Of course, we will also discuss specific areas such as the mind-body interaction (Michael Sharpe, Oxford/UK, Peter Henningsen, Munich/Germany), eating disorders (Ulrike Schmidt, London/UK and Nadia Micali, Copenhagen/Denmark), computational psychosomatics (Matthias Rose, Berlin/Germany) and the planetary health initiative (Christoph Nikendei, Heidelberg/Germany and colleagues). We are also looking forward to welcome ICPM President Hochang Ben Lee (Rochester/USA) and Fiammetta Cosci (Firenze/Italy), editor of the ICPM official Journal “Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics”.

However, we are particularly interested in bringing Early Career Scientists from all over the world into contact with each other and to let you help shape this congress.

Come to Tübingen and join the ICPM conference for a better bio-psycho-social medicine!

Your ICPM congress team