The World Psychiatric Association (WPA) represents over 225,000 psychiatrists around the globe. One of the main aims of WPA is to encourage the highest possible standards of clinical practice. Other objectives include: increasing knowledge and skills about mental disorders and how they can be prevented and treated; to promote mental health; to promote the highest possible ethical standards in psychiatric work; to disseminate knowledge about evidence-based therapy and values based practice; to be a voice for the dignity and human rights of the patients and their families, and to uphold the rights of psychiatrists; and to facilitate communication and assistance especially to societies who are isolated or whose members work in impoverished circumstances. The General Assembly, which meets every three years, agrees to a WPA Action Plan and the latest Plan (passed in Madrid in 2014) included as part of it dissemination of knowledge across countries.
One of the major tasks for this action was to translate materials from other languages into English so that classical papers as well as scientific papers can be shared. To this end this is the second issue of International Review of Psychiatry which is devoted to translations of papers from other languages, and the first issue devoted to papers from Portuguese into English. One of the criteria for inclusion was that they had not been previously published in English. It is important that WPA enables sharing of scientific as well as policy materials from English into other languages but also from other languages into English.
I am grateful to Alexander Moreira-Almeida and Fabrício H. A. Oliveira e Oliveira for taking the task on. They have identified a range of papers which will be of interest globally but equally importantly they delivered on time and their efforts are to be admired.
Thanks are also due to Alexander Smith and his production team at Taylor & Francis for their help and support.