Cultural Psychiatry

Psychotherapy is a rubric--an umbrella under which a vast array of differing interventions exist. Its diverse forms are supported by different ideologies and vocabularies.

We do not need psychiatrists who fit people into categories and slots and treat them as if they are robots, according to the dictates of a recipe book called “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.”

Ethics in the field of mental health is a concern for every psychiatrist, but what happens when past patients reenter a retired clinician's life in a personal setting?

Retirement requires psychological preparation. The planning and anticipation in itself can sometimes bring even more happiness.

In light of our problems and uncertainties about the state of current psychiatry, or perhaps because of them, what might describe good psychiatry? Following are some suggestions for what we, as psychiatrists, can do.

The mental health toll of any form of discrimination is great.

In our current age of increasingly biological psychiatry, psychiatrists seem to be paying less and less attention to the humanities, even as internists and surgeons are paying more attention.

I can just sense the uproar now. Dr. Moffic wants state hospitals again? Has he lost it? Well, yes. I do, sort of. Here’s why.

David Cronenberg’s film "A Dangerous Method" tells the story of the relationship between Freud and Jung and a woman named Sabina who had a considerable influence on both of them.

Adequate treatment of the underlying psychiatric illness consistently appears to be the most effective use of medication in suicidal patients.

What are the psychological aspects of “going green”? How should we address what some call climate instability and global heating?

During their time in Ayacucho, these visiting psychiatrists learned that American psychiatric training has wide-reaching cultural value.

This list serves as a guide when treating persons of diverse cultures and backgrounds.

Psychiatrists cannot, with impunity, disregard an important domain of man’s personality makeup. He ought to remain a searcher of the soul at large.

This article aims to provide a glimpse of recent developments that are relevant to cultural and ethnic influences on psychopharmacological responses.

Knowing from the start how a personality is organized, especially as theorized by Karen Horney-appreciating the primary and repressed moves of the patient, inner dictates, claims, idealized image, and intrapsychic defensive maneuvers-makes the help we offer most likely to succeed.

Studies of mammalian species suggest that they possess awareness of self and even more subtle “human” qualities associated with empathy and social joy.

Any physician can predict death as the outcome of a fatal illness, but the physician who can predict death from among seeming randomness has certainly acquired a superior level of insight.

The grief that the Shoah brought to its victims would make its reappearance even at happy times long afterwards.

Dr Angell and others may be right to claim that we should be concerned about the current practice of psychiatry. But the simple fact that mental illnesses seem to be common is not one of them.

Sexual identity development is a complex, multidimensional, and often fluid process. One must consider cognitive, social, emotional, cultural, and familial complexities among other aspects of the individual’s experience to contextualize a narrative concerning sexual identity development.

In psychiatry, it seems like our traditions are often ignored or discarded as being outdated. Do we not have some time-tested literature that is still relevant to our psychiatric times?

Although memoirs have become all the rage, they are rarely written by anyone in the field of psychiatry . . . and for good reason.

The report notes that pain is a significant public health problem that affects more than 100 million Americans, costs our society at least $560 to $659 billion annually, and can be severely detrimental to the lives of sufferers.

Diminishing libido is a symptom of depression, but antidepressants do not always restore sexual interest. Loss of desire may be the cause of depression, not its consequence. Dr Levine explains the nature of sexual desire and its relationship to arousal including the various biogenic, psychogenic, interpersonal, and cultural factors that contribute to problems associated with sexual desire.