On September 5–8, the International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM) will be holding its 26th World Congress in Istanbul, Turkey. One of the main organizers of this meeting is Dr. Rabia Bilici, who hails from Istanbul and was a Hubert H. Humphrey fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in 2020–2021.
During her stay in the United States, Dr. Bilici was involved in the development of a program called STEPS that was to be a collaborative project between VCU, the International Consortium of Universities for Drug Demand Reduction, the Turkish Ministry of Health, the University of Health Sciences—Turkey, and NIDA. Unfortunately, the project subsequently had to be put on hold.
Dr. Bilici is currently the chair of the East European Regional Council of ISAM; she also is the president and one of the founders of Turkey’s first and only addiction medicine association, the Addiction Psychiatry Foundation (BPV), which evolved from the Addiction Psychiatry Association. For the ISAM World Congress, she serves as one of the five members of the International Organizing Committee.
The World Congress, which has the theme, “Building Bridges: Addiction and Recovery,” will address a wide range of scientific topics, such as recovery management and relapse prevention; rehabilitation; trauma and addiction; prevention and mitigation; women and addiction; populations with special clinical needs; or common co-occurring mental, medical disorders, and infectious diseases in addiction. Issues like legal aspects of addiction and compulsory treatment, ethics for addiction professionals, and international partnership and opportunities for future generations will also be addressed.