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COMPOSING WORLDS 2026
INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL SYMPOSIUM ON MENTAL HEALTH,
HUMANITIES AND NATURE

The Composing Worlds 2026: International Virtual Symposium on Mental Health, Humanities and Nature  takes place at a moment of deep social, environmental and epistemic transformations. Across the globe, mental health concerns are intensifying in parallel with accelerating ecological disruption, digital reconfiguration of social life, growing inequalities, and increasing cultural and social fragmentation. These conditions challenge the limitations of strictly individualised understandings of psychological suffering and call for broader epistemic frameworks capable of addressing the interactions of mind, body, culture, nature and technologies in mental health. The Symposium investigates mental health through a global, interdisciplinary perspective and brings together scholars and practitioners from the humanities, social sciences, health sciences and the arts. Emphasis is placed on the complex interplay between biological, cultural, and environmental systems that shape psychological resilience and vulnerability. By integrating insights from diverse fields of research, the Symposium seeks to generate informed and innovative responses to the mental health challenges of a rapidly changing world. Its panels address key themes such as the disjunction between evolutionary inheritance and cultural structures, the contribution of philosophy and the arts to mental well-being, intersectional and societal determinants of distress, the implications of  AI in psychotherapy and self-construction in digital storytelling, contemporary ethical dilemmas and education, embodied approaches to mind–body dynamics, and emerging models of empathic collaborative research in mental health. By situating mental health at the intersection of humanities, nature and society, Composing Worlds 2026 aims not only to analyse contemporary forms of psychological suffering, but also to contribute to the co-creation of conceptual, ethical and practical frameworks capable of sustaining individual and collective well-being in an increasingly complex world.* **

* Registration required

** Certificate of attendance (paid)

Official Languages: Português, Español & English