Cultural Psychiatry

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.

Media coverage of murderous rampages comprises a grisly-and vastly profitable-reality show. I’ll call it a Slaughterfest. Why do therapists continue to take part in this offensive entertainment?

Psychiatrists experience the impact of managed care perhaps most acutely during the utilization review process, which has become a standard tool for the review of treatment modalities and levels of service in the managed care environment.

What's your first impression of this Rorschach-type image? Is there a place for Rorschach measures in assessing psychotic functioning?

The topics in this Special Report provide a broad picture of the issues psychiatrists face as they take a clear-eyed look at the opportunities and challenges in the emerging health care system.

Vice President of the United States Joe Biden spoke at this year's American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting in New York. Here, a video clip from his speech.

It seems ironic that the Oedipus myth about self-inflicted blindness is so central to psychiatry, but there are few guidelines on treating sensory loss. Here, the evolution of an APA workshop on treating patients with visual impairments.

Presenting a Q&A with Dr Rajesh Tampi and Deena Tampi on the issue of behavioral health in accountable care.

Running into an old friend at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting: Use hashtag #APAAM14.

Emergency psychiatry is helping to redefine acute mental health treatment-facilitating timely access, in less restrictive, outpatient levels of care, for patients in crisis.

There’s a lot going on at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting in the Big Apple this year . . . so much, in fact, that we’ve invited the Chair of Scientific Program Committee, Dr Philip R. Muskin, to provide you with a road map. More in this podcast.

Global child mental health in low- and middle-income countries faces all of the challenges of Western society and many more. This article examines the issues.

It is time for psychiatry’s critics to drop the conspiratorial narrative of the “chemical imbalance” and acknowledge psychiatry’s efforts at integrating biological and psychosocial insights.