Cultural Psychiatry

Everyone, in their own way, wants what's best for people with mental health challenges, but risks and benefits are interpreted through a personal lens.

Although 2 weeks of protected touring is hardly enough time to get a sense of Morocco, there was a familiar parallel to cross-cultural psychiatry. Let the patient tell you what they are about culturally, respect that particular point of view, relate to them as they wish, and support that with study.

What can we do to fix our broken mental health system? Psychiatric Times posed this question to some of the leading experts in the field.

Whether these psychiatrists helped or hindered societal events probably depends on one's political perspective.

In the US, suicide is a leading cause of death, ranking third among youths aged 15 to 24. Rates of suicide attempts and death are highest among US Pacific Island indigenous youths. Emergency departments play a key role in suicide prevention, especially in this and other minority populations.

The main character of Guardians of the Galaxy directly connects to psychiatry and comments on continuing controversies about patient care and health care delivery systems.

We in mental health care may be the last bastion of defense in the deterioration of the doctor-patient relationship. However, this role seems to be underplayed in the call for more integrated medicine of psychiatry with general medicine.

Some inflexible anti-psychiatrists are blind ideologues who see only the limits and harms of mental health treatment, not its necessity or any of its benefits. More in this commentary.

In this video, Dr Andrew Solomon talks about how psychiatrists and psychologists can help depressed or traumatized patients foster resilience, without trivializing their pain.

The legal benefits of marriage are clear and well-known. But what are the psychological benefits?

Clown faces and masks are obvious disguises, but we also disguise ourselves in everyday and therapeutic life, and often therapy has to work through these disguises to get to the core.

Leaders (and really that is all of us in one way or another) have the challenge of understanding and responding to future risk.

The manner in which a clinician enters the room and approaches and engages with an intercultural patient and family can either set off or relieve “culture shock.”

If you're up for a little ancient humor, you'll love this original translation of an ancient Babylonian text in which a physician is jilted on a fee, then is further embarrassed in his efforts to collect it.

What effect does exposure to violence in video games have on behavior? These authors examine the evidence.

It should be clear that racism remains a major problem in the US-in sports, psychiatry, mental health treatment, and elsewhere.

If we didn't so stigmatize the severely mentally ill, we would feel an urgent responsibility to rescue them immediately from prison and homelessness.

Until I attended the recent Graphic Medicine conference at Johns Hopkins, I did not appreciate the skyrocketing popularity of “graphic novels” as “illness narratives,” writes this psychiatrist.

This case stresses the importance of identifying cultural issues that arise in mental health clinical encounters.

The recent 2014 Joint Report of the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriffs’ Association could have been a most useful and timely report on the woefully inadequate access to appropriate levels of mental health services for incarcerated seriously mentally ill persons. This author believes the report will only make the problem worse.

Suicide is a pervasive public health issue for adolescents in Hawaii. In response, a youth leadership model was initiated to empower young leaders in suicide prevention through evidence-based training, relationship building, and community awareness.

Minorities remain less likely to receive diagnosis and treatment for their mental illness and more likely to die by suicide. As ethnocultural diversity within the US grows, psychiatrists are increasingly evaluating attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of a broad spectrum of ethnocultural groups.

Epidemiological research has shown that the Māori people of New Zealand are approximately twice as likely to have serious psychiatric illness compared with non-Māori. Here, a child and adolescent psychiatrist describes her work in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

As a psychiatrist, I have spent years training to help others deal with loss and suffering. When it is your own loss, however, you realize that you are sometimes powerless to shield yourself from your pain.

A limited sampling presented here lends no support to Dr Thomas Szasz’s claim that 19th century physicians regarded the term “mental disease” as merely a figure of speech; on the contrary, several prominent physicians of this era recognized such conditions as both real and debilitating.