The International Psychogeriatric Association: building on 25 years of leadership and vision.

The International Psychogeriatric Association (IPA) was founded 25 years ago as a multidisciplinary organization with the ambitious vision of improving the mental health of the elderly around the world. For a variety of reasons, some leaders were skeptical about the value of an international organization and it was the vision and energy of Dr. Sanford Finkel, together with a relatively small group of colleagues, who brought IPA to life and nurtured it through its infancy. Dr. Finkel, known to all as Sandy, has chronicled some of the history of IPA elsewhere and I won’t repeat it here other than to emphasize the profound effect that IPA’s first executive director, the dedicated and beloved Fern Finkel, had on IPA until her retirement in 2006. The importance of IPA as a leading professional organization is now well established, but beyond its many achievements in molding and guiding the profession, IPA is also a professional home for our members, a place of intellectual comfort where colleagues speak a common language and share common goals. Within IPA we can relax, share universal concerns for the ambivalently viewed population of elders that the world worries about but often avoids or ignores at the same time. We can share our challenges and they are many, our hopes, our successes and our uncertainties. The past 25 years have seen seminal changes in the field of psychogeriatrics, and IPA and its leading members have been at the forefront of guiding these developments. Of particular influence were the advances made during the 1990s which were heavily dominated by research and clinical foci on the brain that received strong financial incentives from both government and industry. This produced transformative change in the field including the first generation of practical cognitive enhancers, new generation antipsychotics and antidepressants, genetic knowledge, neuroimaging techniques and knowledge of basic mechanisms of disease. IPA’s nine consensus conferences reflected the hope and excitement of these advances and since 1994 have focused on various aspects of dementia such as coining, refining and disseminating the seminal concept of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (Landsdowne, U.S.A., 1996 and 1999), defining frameworks for measuring outcomes in dementia research (New York, 1994 and Canterbury, England, 2006), refining therapeutic directions for vascular change in the brain (Madrid, 2001), and crystallizing diagnostic consensus on Alzheimer’s disease (Geneva, 1996), dementia with Lewy bodies (Budapest, 2002), agitation in dementia (Lisbon, 2003), and mild cognitive impairment (Bethesda, U.S.A., 2005). Despite the field’s dramatic progress in understanding the dementias, we have a long way to go in educating