Cultural Psychiatry

During the past 2 decades, there has been enormous growth of interest in and visibility of cultural psychiatry. Much of this is due to the steady increase in migration of the world’s population from low-income to higher-income regions and countries.

Until the early 19th century, psychiatry and religion were closely connected. Religious institutions were responsible for the care of the mentally ill. A major change occurred when Charcot1 and his pupil Freud2 associated religion with hysteria and neurosis. This created a divide between religion and mental health care, which has continued until recently. Psychiatry has a long tradition of dismissing and attacking religious experience. Religion has often been seen by mental health professionals in Western societies as irrational, outdated, and dependency forming and has been viewed to result in emotional instability.3

The ancient role of conscience as a moral pilot is rejuvenated, and its neglected function as a spiritual daemon is refurbished for more psychologically minded modern readers.

Information transmission, such as blogs, RSS feeds, and podcasts, have emerged as common forms of communication. The exponential growth of medical knowledge and the increasingly rapid pace of scientific discovery have made it nearly impossible for the print medium to keep abreast of new developments.

You have read the blogs and seen the placards a dozen times: doctors prescribe too many “drugs” for too many patients. Psychiatrists, in particular, are popular targets of politically motivated language that seeks to conflate the words “medication” and “drug”-thereby tapping into the public’s understandable fears concerning “drug abuse” and its need to carry out a “War on Drugs.”

To Americans over 30, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are buzzwords that lack much meaning. But to those born between 1982 and 2001-often referred to as “millennials” or “Generation Y”-they are a part of everyday life. For the uninitiated, these Web sites are used for social networking and communication. They are also places where individuals can post pictures and news about themselves and express their opinions on everything from music to movies to politics. Some sites, such as YouTube, allow individuals to post videos of themselves, often creating enough “buzz” to drive hundreds and even thousands of viewers; in some instances, these videos create instant media stars-such as the Obama imitator, Iman Crosson.

Those who know Sacha Baron Cohen will tell you he is nothing like Brüno or the other characters he impersonates. The third son of an orthodox Jewish family, he grew up in a suburb of London, went to fancy British schools, and spent a year living in Israel. He read history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where an interest in the role of American Jews in the Civil Rights Movement led to his thesis on the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi. Not the biography of a man you would imagine inventing Ali G, an American ghetto rapper; or Borat, an anti-Semitic TV reporter from Kazakhstan; or Brüno, a gay Austrian fashionista who wants to be as famous as that other Austrian, Adolf Hitler. These characters have made Baron Cohen one of the preeminent icons of popular culture.

An overview of the critical issues involved in overcoming personal and organizational barriers to help substance abusers quit smoking.

There is no magic moment when it becomes clear that the world needs a new edition of the DSM. With just one exception, the publication dates of all previous DSM’s were determined by the appearance of new revisions of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Thus, DSM-I appeared in conjunction with ICD-6 in 1952; DSM-II with ICD-8 in 1968; DSM-III with ICD-9 in 1980; and DSM-IV with ICD-10 in 1994. The lone exception was DSM-IIII-R, which appeared in 1987-out of cycle only because it was originally meant to be no more than a minor revision. The official publication date for DSM-V is May 2012. That date was picked to be consistent with an earlier, no longer correct, expectation that ICD-11 would be published in that same year.

I appreciate Drs Spitzer and Frances’ prompt response to my article, which was published in the July issue of Psychiatric Times. I also thank them for their good wishes and thoughts about what we are doing as members of the DSM-V workgroups-membership whose rules we all knew and freely accepted.

Many refugees have been victims of severe violence that has profoundly affected their physical, psychological, and spiritual lives.

PTSD filled a nosological gap by providing a way to characterize the long-lasting effects of trauma exposure.1 This led to a plethora of previously lacking scientific observations. Now the existence of PTSD is being called into question because some of the original assumptions that helped make the case for it have proved to be incorrect.2-4 However, it is possible to update some of the flawed assumptions of PTSD without rescinding the diagnosis. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Being a member of 1 of the 13 working groups of the DSM-V Task Force is, indeed, a unique experience. Having a large number of respected colleagues working diligently on areas that they have mastered with indisputable authority over the years is an intellectually fascinating experience.

Der Spiegel has anointed Fatih Akin the new face of the German film industry. Of Turkish descent, Akin has no interest in the ghosts of Germany’s past or in facing history through films such as The Reader-which still attract large audiences and Oscar nominations in America. Akin finds his inspiration in the new Europe and in the lives of people like himself who are the rising generation of Europe’s immigrants.

Despite their severe physical impairment, disability, and frequent medical complications, tetraplegic patients reported a very positive outlook on life, according to a recent study. In another, 63% of major lottery winners chose to con­tinue working full-time at their same jobs.

Psychotropic treatment can often prevent the relapse of psychotic and mood symptoms. However, many patients take medication intermittently or not at all; or the symptoms may be only partially responsive to medication. Therefore, there is a need for interventions that can supplement the effect of medication and improve treatment outcomes.

Lord, protect me from all the institutions that want to guard me from harm-Congress, PhRMA, academics, journal publishers, and even my APA. They fear I will be brainwashed. They fear-heaven forefend- I may use drugs “off-label.” I hesitate to inform you-it’s too late! I already prescribe medications offlabel, and I do it every day.

Recent decades have seen an outpouring of publications about psychological trauma. With its formal diagnostic category of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Western psychiatric medicine has led the way in opening up this field of study. Many other disciplines of inquiry, including sociology, anthropology, legal studies, and literary studies, also have contributed their distinctive approaches and methodologies to the subject. Most recently, professional historians in Britain, Germany, Austria, Australia, Canada, and the United States have researched the origins of PTSD to great effect. These “new historical trauma studies” draw heavily on pioneering medical research from earlier places and periods. In addition, empirical findings from and analytical insights into humanity’s troubled, traumatic past provide ideas, observations, and insights that may be useful for mental health practitioners today.

A revamped museum in Italy is providing a hands-on and heads-on approach to mental illness. The Museo della Mente (Mind's Museum), which originally opened in 2000, is located on the outskirts of Rome in a former psychiatric hospital that closed in 1978

Major depressive disorder has become psychiatry’s signature diagnosis. Depression is diagnosed in about 40% of patients who see a psychiatrist. This percentage is double that of just 20 years ago.

Racial/ethnic and sexual orientation minorities and women historically have been relegated to social, legal, and economic disadvantage in the United States.

A strategic plan to guide research priorities and resource allocations of the NIMH was released recently by NIMH Director, Thomas R. Insel, MD. The plan is intended to provide direction over the next 5 years toward the institute’s stated vision of “a world in which mental illnesses are prevented and cured.”

In his review of my book, Doing Psychiatry Wrong: A Critical and Prescriptive Look at a Faltering Profession (Psychiatric Times, June 2008, page 57), S.N. Ghaemi, MD, MPH, citing George Orwell, writes that I “seek to justify an opinion” rather than “seek the truth.” He claims that my “errors are numerous and fundamental.”

The term “domestic violence” emerged in the United States with the rise of the women’s movement in the 1970s. Before that, violence between partners was considered a private matter. A specific type of domestic violence, intimate partner violence, refers to violence between intimate partners. Public awareness campaigns help us identify one type of intimate partner violence in which one partner, typically the male partner, is the aggressor, and the other partner, typically the female, is the victim.

he key manifestations of DSM-IV somatoform disorder are unexplained physical symptoms or complaints that tend to coexist with other psychiatric syndromes or are linked to psychological issues. These symptoms typically lead to repeated medical or emergency department visits; are associated with serious discomfort, dysfunction, and disability; and lead to significant health expenditures.