Transcultural Psychiatry

“Globalization itself, the idea of everyone connecting isn’t necessarily a bad thing but the way it’s being enacted is causing problems”

Kwame McKenzie, of the Univesity of Toronto shares his thoughts about mental health issues surrounding globalization. In a globalized economy, city centres swell as populations move from rural to urban spaces to better access opportunities, especially in low income countries. In tandem with higher urbanization there is an increased prevalence of depression, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and poverty, which presents a pressing mental health issue in a time of rapid social change.  Stressing the link of mental well being to economic prosperity, Dr. McKenzie advocates for a public health approach where the causes of mental health problems are addressed directly, as a better alternative to increasing services, which he feels is “a solution” but not “the solution”.

Laurence Kirmayer recently gave a new version of his lecture “Revisioning psychiatry: Cultural phenomenology, critical neuroscience, and global mental health”. The talk was presented as a guest lecture at the FPR-UCLA Programme for Culture, Brain, Development, and Mental Health in January 2013. Click here for more information on the programme.

“Working with interpreters has enriched all my clinical work. What it has made me do is make me think about how I construct my language, how I construct explanatory models of mental health.”

Rachel Tribe, Professor at the School of Psychology at the University of East London talks about the benefits and challenges involved in working with interpreters in mental health care. Given that complex cultural constructs are communicated through language, Tribe puts forward suggestions on how mental health practitioners and interpreters can work together to provide the best care for their patients.

To obtain a copy of the guidelines for Working with Interpreters in Health Settings, mentioned at the end of Dr. Tribe’s interview, click here

“When we globalize mental health, concepts of mental health, practices, and the ideology behind them, we are globalizing a particular way of being a person, a contemporary Western way of being a person.”

Derek Summerfield, honorary senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, University of London provides a critical view on global mental health. Arguing that it is irresponsible to export Western mental health concepts and methodologies that may have questionnable results even in the West to other societies, Dr. Summerfield provides suggestions on how mental health research could move forward.

Addressing the critique that Global Mental Health is a Western export, Dr. Vikram Patel, Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, asserts: “There is a rich history of mental health care in virtually every society of the world that easily predates biomedical psychiatry”. Dr. Patel elaborates on one of the most pressing challenges currently facing global mental health: improving access to care in a culturally appropriate way. How can health service providers bridge local knowledge with biomedical approaches to mental health care and how can services be delivered to people in need in areas where there are limited health care professionals?

In a talk given in the Department of Human Development at the University of Chicago this past October, Laurence Kirmayer gave a sweeping overview of the state of research in transcultural psychiatry, and proposed viable routes for moving forward. Thanks to the blog Somatosphere, we have a video of his presentation.

In order to reduce risk factors for children, cultural therapists and psychologists worked with a group of 30 school-aged children with conduct disorders in Allman Town, Jamaica. Working at the school-level, this form of early intervention combined cultural therapy with remedial math, reading, art, crafts and music. In this video the project team, Frederick Hickling and Hilary Robertson-Hickling, both at the University of the West Indies, and Jaswant Guzder at McGill University, discuss the reasoning behind the programme and share its outcomes.

Please come back and visit us soon. This is the blog for the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry. We will soon be posting videos from the 2012 Advanced Study Institute conference—Global Mental Health: Bridging the Perspectives of Cultural Psychiatry and Public Health.