In 1997, a celebration was held in Madrid to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Clinica Juan Jose López-Ibor. The clinic's founder, J.J. López-Ibor had achieved considerable notoriety in the 1950s for a publication on human sexuality. A decade earlier, he achieved a different kind of celebrity when he and other Spanish intellectuals were placed under house arrest by Francisco Franco. In 1964, 3 years prior to the opening of his clinic in Madrid, he was voted the third president of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA).

That evening, his son Juan J. López-Ibor Aliño, addressed the gathering of psychiatrists and dignitaries. Professor López-Ibor Aliño and several of his siblings had followed their father into psychiatry and 2 years later, in 1999, he would step into his father's former position as president of the WPA.

Also speaking that evening was a representative from the Vatican in Rome, Dr Joaquin Navarro-Valls. Statistics place the number of baptized Catholics in Spain somewhere between 96% and 99% of the population. While the presence of such a high-ranking member of the Catholic Church was one reason for the attentiveness of the audience, another was the subject of the talk: social stigma and the depersonalization of the individual as major impediments to treatment. Navarro-Valls spoke to those assembled at the clinic of the need to see the face of God in the faces of those living with mental illness.