Making the Unseen Seen
The Manuel Orozco-Alcocer (MOA) Award, established in his memory, recognizes initiatives, research, and interventions using artificial intelligence that broaden our understanding of mental health in contemporary societies—especially efforts that help make visible people whose distress often goes unseen.
At a time when public discourse has rightly expanded visibility for many traditionally marginalized communities, this award also seeks to draw attention to populations that frequently remain outside the spotlight: individuals facing life circumstances that can make emotional suffering harder to detect and easier to overlook—such as older adults, people experiencing unemployment, retirement, social isolation, and those living in contexts shaped by cultural barriers to expressing vulnerability, stigma, limited resources, or limited access to mental health services.
These trajectories can create conditions in which challenges such as depression, anxiety, substance misuse, loneliness, diminished sense of purpose, and difficulty identifying or communicating emotions may go unnoticed or be addressed only belatedly. This is not only a clinical omission, but also a social one: as a community, we can fail to notice suffering until it becomes severe. The MOA Award affirms that mental health challenges can profoundly affect quality of life while never defining the value, identity, or dignity of a person.
The MOA Award recognizes accepted ICAIMH contributions that combine artificial intelligence with research, intervention design, and real-world implementation to:
Make visible mental health realities in populations that are often unnoticed, underdiagnosed, or underserved.
Promote new forms of detection, support, prevention, and access to care that are feasible in real-world settings.
Reduce barriers that keep people from being "seen" in the first place—whether due to stigma, cultural norms, limited resources, or limited service availability.
Demonstrate context-sensitive design, including cultural awareness and responsiveness to real constraints (e.g., low connectivity).
In particular, the award values approaches that use AI to help identify and support individuals who are unlikely to reach clinical settings on their own—for example, people who would not normally seek psychological or psychiatric care, or who are not reached by conventional screening pathways.
All accepted ICAIMH papers are eligible for consideration. A dedicated MOA Award Committee will review eligible papers and select the work it deems most aligned with the award's purpose and most deserving of recognition. The MOA Award Committee's decision is final.
The recipient will be announced during the conference, alongside the other ICAIMH awards, and will receive a USD $300 award stipend in recognition of the contribution. The awardee will also be highlighted in ICAIMH communications.
If you or your organization would like to support the MOA Award by increasing the award stipend, please contact us at contact@icaimh.org. Contributions may be publicly acknowledged or kept private, according to the contributor's preference.
If a contributor wishes to be publicly recognized, ICAIMH can also acknowledge the contribution through sponsorship recognition (e.g., name/logo). Contacting us will allow us to coordinate the preferred form of acknowledgment.